Just recently, I was involved in an Exchange 2019 upgrade for a client. Now I’ve been involved with Exchange since it was Exchange 5.0, so it was a pleasant change from Microsoft 365 or Cloud Identity work.
Details
Customer D has two environments: sandbox and production. Each contains Windows 2012 R2 servers hosting Active Directory and Exchange 2013. The sandbox is a mirror of production, separated logically and electronically. The customer asked me to install Exchange 2019 CU9 on Windows Server 2019 Core.
In building the new servers, we found that there are two gotchas that Exchange admin needs to be aware of.
Problems with installing UMCA4.0
Most Exchange admins would download the UCMA 4.0 in line with the Exchange 2019 Pre-requisites. The problem is that the downloaded version cannot be installed as it returns an error. A look through the Microsoft forums found an answer in that .NET 4.8 requires UCMA 6.0. Although it is available for download, you can’t install it as you will get the same error.
Instead, you need to mount the Exchange 2019 ISO and browse to the “UCMARedist folder”. Run the setup.exe from there and it will install correctly.
https://techgenix.com/exchange-2019-on-server-2019-core/
ContentIndexState is “NotApplicable”
As the customer and I were completing the upgrade, he asked me why the database replicas were showing the Content Index State as “NotApplicable”, and should he be worried? When Microsoft created Exchange 2019, they created a new search infrastructure. Named “Big Funnel”, this makes searches faster and provides better results as the search indexes are no longer stored on the disks. I pointed him at the following posts, and he felt a lot happier after reading them.
