Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

The Exchange team Blog (EHLO) has a pointer to some good resources for building an automated Exchange 2007 installation here and here

it also has some templates for your server build documentation for Exchange servers, always better to start with something than start from scratch!

Automation is one of those great things in Microsoft products, almost all of the products support automated installation, but often unless you are setting up hundreds of them the time invested to get it up and working far exceeds the time it would take to deploy so any pre-build resources and guides are an excellent idea.

Install automation can ensure you have repeatable results – this is especially handy where you are factoring in a non-P2V disaster recovery situation or where you have labs/demo environments or are trusting local IT staff to deploy and manage enterprise applications in a distributed environment.