Installing Exchange 2016 and Disabled SMBv1 Issue

Introduction

Recently I was working with a customer upgrading their on-prem servers that are purely used for mail relay to Microsoft 365 (thus locked down to Port 25 to and from Microsoft 365) and the Exchange Server 2016 (their choice) installs had an issue. First server I was about to install without any issues at all. When building the second server, using the same ISO file and having prepared the server with the same prerequisite script, the installation failed around step 1 of the installation process.

Issue

Solution

Apparently, disabling SMBv1 can cause this issue. What we need to do is simply enable it, install Exchange 2016 and then disable it again. Here are the steps for that:
Disble SMBv1 to allow Exchange 2016 install:

Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName SMB1Protocol

Disable SMBv1 to enhance security of the server:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName SMB1Protocol

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/file-server/troubleshoot/detect-enable-and-disable-smbv1-v2-v3

Conclusion

For this one I don’t have an answer to why one server installation failed and the other succeeded as the same prerequisite script was used both times and SMBv1 was not enabled on either server.

Comments? Questions?

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