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

-
Right click on the Exchange
server name, and then click Properties

-
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

-
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.

-
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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