I have ben tasked with archiving the contents of an Exchange 2010 on premises server after it has been decommissioned and all its active mailboxes moved to a hosted Exchange 2010 solution.
I have a few options:
set up a secondary LAN, segregated from the active one, at the server's original physical location and archive the Exchange 2010 after its two supporting Windows 2003 servers (AD controllers and DNS) have also been decommissioned (as this is when I would be able to move them onto the secondary network with the Exchange 2010).
move the AD and DNS onto the Windows 2008 R2 server and do the archiving offsite, which would be preferred for expedience's sake.
transport the 3 servers offsite and archive there - the benefit there being that I would not need to take the active LAN offline to put in a WAN side switch for the second LAN.
In my experience, archiving several hundred mailboxes to PST takes a while and many attempts at each mailbox. Knowing the condition these servers are in, I am pretty sure best practices have not been followed at initial setup and there are potential directory replication issues and other kinks.
For expedience's sake, I would prefer to get this done before the two 2003 servers are decommissioned as that may take a while. Not because of the AD and DNS but because of other services still running on those servers that need to be moved.
My question is, in a non production environment that only needs to exist long enough for me to extract the mailboxes into PST archives, would it be a possibility to configure AD and DNS on the same server Exchange 2010 is running on?
If that sounds like more trouble than physically moving the supporting servers or setting up a secondary network at the original location, I will heed that advice. I am already leaning towards not attempting to move AD and DNS onto the Exchange 2010, but am putting this out there just in case I am wrong and this is not as big a pain as I am assuming it would be.
Thanks for any input from the Exchange/AD veterans out there...