Exchange Server 2010 Standard Edition support only having a maximum of five databases per server. It might be sufficient for many companies, however, for some companies, they require having more than 5 databases, in this case, they need Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise Edition which supports a maximum of one hundred databases per server.

In my test lab, I already have an Exchange Server 2010 Standard edition, and will upgrade it to Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise Edition. There will be no reinstallation process. a single command will do the job.

Note: You can upgrade from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition, however, you can't downgrade from Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition

1. To verify your Exchange Server 2010 edition, open Exchange Management Console, and then Click on Server Configuration
   
   
   
   

2. Right click on the Exchange server name, and then click Properties
   
   
   

3. Under the General tab, the edition of the selected Exchange server will be displayed. As you can see its currently installed and activated as Standard Edition
   
   
   
   

4. To upgrade the the Server from Standard to Enterprise Edition, you will need to have the Enterprise Edition Product Key and run it along a command in the Exchange Management Shell.
   
   Open the Exchange Management Shell,
   
   
   
   and run the following command : 
   
   Set-ExchangeServer -Identity <SERVER NAME> -ProductKey <PRODUCT KEY>
   
   where <SERVER NAME> is your server name, in my case : ELMAJDAL-EX2
   and <PRODUCT KEY> is the Product Key of the Enterprise Edition of Exchange Server
   
   
   
   The operation will be completed successfully and you will be presented with a warning message stating :
   
   WARNING: The product key has been validated and the product ID has been successfully created. This change won't take
   effect until the Information Store service has been restarted.
   
   
   
   To restart the Information Store service, open Services console, then right click on the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service and click on Restart
   
   Note : Restarting the Information Store makes your Mailbox unavailable for users. So if you have a DAG setup, move the database to another server.
   
   
   
   

5. To confirm the changes are applied, go back to Server Configuration node, and check the properties of the server, you will see that the edition of the server now is showing Enterprise
   
   
   
   

Summary

Upgrading Exchange Server from Standard to Enterprise Edition does not need to reinstall the server, it is easily done by running a command in the Exchange Command Shell and restarting the Information Store service.

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