Exchange 2007 Installation for 2003 Coexistence -- Beware of this....

We were trying to install Exchange 2007 on one of our lab servers so we could continue to coexist with an existing Exchange 2003 domain.

If you are trying to do this:

Make sure you are running the install as Domain Admin and Schema Admin (and for good measure also an Enterprise Admin).

We neglected to do this and found intermittent problems throughout our initial configuration.

Yes -- it's obvious in hindsight -- but it was not obvious to us on Thursday afternoon when we were considering taking sledgehammers to our hardware.

Had we done this using VMware's 64 bit emulator we could have rolled back Exchange and tried again. Instead, we'll be reformatting and trying again.

We're hoping someone else will benefit from our experience.