Exchange licensing from 2010 to 2019

Question

When upgrading from Exchange 2010 to 2019 there is an intermediate step required 2010-->2016-->2019. Will licenses purchased for 2019 cover me through the intermediate upgrade to 2016?

Answer 1

You have downgrade rights if purchased through the Volume Licensing:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/existing-customer/fulfillment?activetab=fulfillment-pivot%3aprimaryr2

Note also that you can run Exchange in standard mode for 180 days without a license as well if you wanted to simply use the 2016 server as an intermediate step

The trial edition functions just like an Exchange Standard Edition server and is helpful if you want to try out Exchange before you buy it, or to run tests in a lab. The only difference is that you can only use an Exchange server licensed as a trial edition for up to 180 days.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/plan-and-deploy/post-installation-tasks/enter-product-key?view=exchserver-2019

Answer 2

As Andy mentioned, you can run Exchange 2016 trial which will give you 5x databases you can mount and then once migrated from 2010 you can then decom it and move to 2019. You wont be able to introduce Exchange 2019 until Exchange 2010 is out the environment.