Exchange 2019: Installation on Windows Server 2019 Core

Article
1/17/2024

Introduction

In one of the previous posts we covered installing Exchange Server 2019 on Windows Server 2016/2019 Full desktop, in this article we will cover installing Exchange Server 2019 on Windows 2019 Core.

In Azure, Microsoft have the preview OS available for Server 2019 where I installed this. The basics are the same, In Azure you select a network and have an IP address assigned but in production you will most likely assign a static one. Join the machine to the domain once done and reboot.

The next step is to copy the setup files across to the server, in my instance I used a folder called Installs.

To configure your networks, Server Name etc. you run sconfig.cmd on Server Core at the prompt.

Preparation

We need to do a few things before starting as follows:

To Enable file sharing you can run the following command:

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="File and Printer Sharing" new enable=Yes

2. Mounting the Exchange Server 2019 ISO

Now to mount the Exchange Server 2019 ISO, you can run the following command:

Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath "C:\Installs\ExchangeServer2019-x64.iso"

3. Installing UCMA runtime 4.0

To install UCMA runtime 4.0 as required by the setup of Exchange you can navigate to the UCMARedist folder in the ISO and run the setup.

4. Installing Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable Package

Once that is done you can install Visual C++ 2013 which you need to download unfortunately but it will hopefully be included in the Full release of Exchange Server 2019.

5. Install Exchange Server 2019

Now we can proceed to the installation of Exchange Server 2019, you can launch it by running the following command below, make sure you are in the ISO folder:

Setup.EXE /Mode:Install /InstallWindowsComponents /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /Roles:MB

You will notice in the command above, I let the installation handle the Windows Prerequisites, if you prefer to install them manually then you will need to run the following before you attempt the Exchange Installation:

Install-WindowsFeature Web-WebServer,Web-Common-Http,Web-Default-Doc,Web-Dir-Browsing,Web-Http-Errors,Web-Static-Content,Web-Http-Redirect,Web-Health,Web-Http-Logging,Web-Log-Libraries,Web-Request-Monitor,Web-Http-Tracing,Web-Performance,Web-Stat-Compression,Web-Dyn-Compression,Web-Security,Web-Filtering,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Client-Auth,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-App-Dev,Web-Net-Ext45,Web-Asp-Net45,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-Mgmt-Tools,Web-Mgmt-Compat,Web-Metabase,Web-WMI,Web-Mgmt-Service,NET-Framework-45-ASPNET,NET-WCF-HTTP-Activation45,NET-WCF-MSMQ-Activation45,NET-WCF-Pipe-Activation45,NET-WCF-TCP-Activation45,Server-Media-Foundation,MSMQ-Services,MSMQ-Server,RSAT-Feature-Tools,RSAT-Clustering,RSAT-Clustering-PowerShell,RSAT-Clustering-CmdInterface,RPC-over-HTTP-Proxy,WAS-Process-Model,WAS-Config-APIs