Hello everyone. We are currently running Exchange 2013, CU4 and are planning on upgrading to CU13. Our Exchange Server is a standalone server with CAS and Mailbox roles installed, it is not a member of a DAG, and is not installed in a hybrid environment. We have not made any customizations to OWA, or our web config, and the only third party add-on is our Exchange Aware backup software. As this is our production server and we are without a testing server, I am attempting to cover eventualities before proceeding.
I have read a number of articles relating to best practices at Paul Cunningham's site, Oxford SBS Guy's site, and here on Technet, and am reasonably confident about the upgrade, but some questions still linger.
For one, do I need to place our server in Maintenance Mode? I have read conflicting and somewhat vague accounts on this. From what I've read, as our server is standalone and not a DAG member, this does not seem necessary. There is no backup Exchange server to send mail to, so mail delivery will be stopped for the upgrade process irregardless.
Second, do I need to stop our Backup software's services? Again, I've seen this mentioned in relation to employing Backup Exec, but not to our current solution. I've looked on our provider's website for an FAQ relating to this, but have come up short. I may send them an email regarding this question in the meantime.
Any advice that can be provided will be appreciated. Thank you much.
-Sean Murphy