Exchange Server SE Installation & Upgrade Screenshots

In this post we’re capturing a point-in-time reference of the Exchange Server Subscription Edition installation process. As Microsoft continues to evolve Exchange with its subscription-based model, setup screens, prerequisites, and configuration options may change over time. The goal here isn’t to walk through the steps in detail, but simply to document what the installation experience looks like today. A visual snapshot for future comparison and reference. These screenshots provide a baseline of the current setup flow, useful for anyone planning deployments or tracking how Exchange Server continues to evolve.

The overall process should look *VERY* similar to Exchange Server 2019. In the RTM release of SE there are really three things that changed:

License Terms
Name changed to Subscription Edition
Build & Version number

This was done to ease the transition from Exchange 2019 to SE.

Planning And Preparation

As with every project proper, planning and preparation is required. Deploying Exchange is no different. Learn has an overview of the steps that are required:

Exchange SE Fresh Install

Kicking off the installer you can immediately see that the name is now Exchange Server Subscription Edition.

You will want to ensure that you read the license aspect as this part changed, and also look at the Exchange team blog post and comments here to understand what this means with SE.

Note that by default the recommended settings option was selected to send diagnostic data.

Long gone are the options to split out Hub, CAS roles etc. All of that is now combined in the mailbox role.

This will be a regular Exchange server, domain joined and will host mailboxes etc. so the mailbox role option was selected.

Note that the management tools option is selected automatically. All of the OS prerequisites were installed prior. So there is no need to use the option to automatically install the OS bundled pre-requisites.

As a sidenote, I never used to use that feature as it would add an extra reboot step in older versions of Windows. Exchange would see a pending restart and refuse to install until the pending restart was cleared. That was corrected in Windows, but old habits stick...

Exchange SE still defaults to the same v15 installation path.

Note the double negatitive on the malware protection settings. In the below, selecting no means that "yes, I want malware scanning to be enabled".

Then setup does a final check to make sure that we are good to go.

If that completes with no issues, the Install button then is enabled.

Click install and then strap in for a rather lengthy install. It is not quick.

In some lab environments this takes an hour.

Once setup has completed, not that Extended Protection is enabled by default and you are asl prompted to restart the server and also run the Exchange Health Check script to make sure all is good.