CLI and Unattended Installation

Exchange 2007 also supports installation from a command line interface (CLI), which can be used to perform unattended installations as well. There are a number of switches that are required depending on the type of Exchange 2007 installation you are performing.

•  /roles – specifies which server roles will be installed. Can be substituted with /r
  • ET or E – Gateway Server
  • HT or H – Bridgehead Server
  • CA or C– Client Access Server
  • MB or M – Mailbox Server
  • UM or U – Unified Messaging
  • MT or T – Admin Tools
• /PrepareAD – is used to prep the Active Directory schema manually. This switch is optional as the schema is extended automatically during installation. Can be substitued with /p
• /TargetDir – specifies the directory in which to install Exchange 2007. Can be substituted with /t
• /SourceDir – specify the location of the install files
• /DomainController – allows you to specify a DC to use. Can be substituted with /dc
• /AnswerFile:filename
• /mode – Determines if the install is a default install or a recovery install. Required if you wish to use the /RecoverServer switch
  • Install – this is the default mode used when no /mode switch is provided
  • Upgrade – this mode is used when upgrading an Exchange 2007 installation
  • Uninstall – this mode is used to uninstall Exchange 2007 or one of its roles
  • RecoverServer – this mode is used when recovering a failed Exchange 2007 server

The basic syntax of a CLI or unattended installation is as follows:

Setup.exe /console /roles:<server roles to install> /mode:<setup mode> [/targetdir:<destination folder>] [/prepareAD] [/RecoverServer] [/?]

To install Exchange 2007 with the Bridgehead, Client Access and Mailbox server roles, you would use the following from a command prompt:

Setup.exe  /roles:ET,MB,CA  or

Setup.exe  /r:E,M,C

Let’s say you wanted to install a Gateway server and put the program files in a directory on the D drive called E2007 and you wanted to read and write from DC1; you would use the following switches with Setup.exe:

Setup.exe  /r:E /targetdir:D:\E2007 /dc:dc1.thelazyadmin.lab

This last example demonstrates what command you would use to install a new Exchange 2007 server during a disaster recovery operation.

Setup.exe  /mode:recoverserver

Once the command is executed, setup will proceed to determine if .NET 2.0 Framework, MMC 3.0 and the Microsoft Shell is installed. If any of the other prerequisite checks fail, setup will stop and display an error message.

Verifying Installation

Once you have completed the installation, you should verify that everything completed successfully. To do this there are a few things you can check out. The first thing you can do is open up MSH and run the following command which will list the roles installed (see Figure 8)

Get-ExchangeServer

Figure 8: MSH Get-ExchangeServer

Next look in the Application Log in Event Viewer for event ID 1003 and 1004 which verify that install was successful. Finally there are a number of log files created that you can browse to verify that the install was successful and if it was not, what might be wrong.

• %SystemDrive%\Exchange\ExchangeSetupLogs\Setup.log – will tell you if the prerequisite checks passed and what roles were installed.
• %SystemDrive%\ExchangeSetupLogs\ExchangeServerMSI.log – will tell you if the file extraction was the cause of any errors.
• %SystemDrive%\ExchangeSetupLogs\Exchange Server Setup Progress.log – will tell you what system changes were made during the installation.
• %SystemDrive%\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ Logging\SetupLogs\setup.log – tracks operations during install, look here when an install fails.