Planning on upgrading to Server 2008 R2? You may have to wait till Exchange 2010

For those of you like me who are keen to see Windows Server 2008 R2 released may be in for a nasty surprise.

Disclosed on the MS Exchange Team Blog it appears that Windows Server 2008 R2 does not support the installation of Exchange 2007. I magine this has something to do with the fact that 2008 R2 has more in common with Windows 7 where 2008 was more like Vista in some respects. But of course the main reason from Microsoft themselves is that Exchange 2010 is due to be released shortly after the 2008 R2 and Windows 7 release. Microsoft are obviously more concered with ensuring compatibility with the latest offerings as opposed to checking backwards compatibility. It will be interesting to see if Exchange 2010 will hapily run on Windows Server 2008 operating system.

However for those companies out there that have Software Assurance on their Microsoft Licensing won't have to pay for the new version of either software, so migrating to Exchange Server 2010 along with Windows Server 2008 R2 is not too much of an issue.

The Exchange blog clarifies it a bit better on point 4, Exchange 2007 will only use Windows Server 2008 R2 DC’s not run on them....
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/07/17/451835.aspx