All posts by jaapwesselius

Exchange, Office365

Moving Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration – Part II

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Before you start moving mailboxes you have to make sure that all accepted domains used by mailboxes on-premises are configured in Office 365. This can be tricky, you wouldn’t be the first admin that experience failed migration because of a domain.local email address on an on-premises Mailbox J

Now, when you want to move a mailbox from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online, navigate again to the Exchange Admin Center, and under recipients select migration. Click the + icon and select migrate to Exchange Online to start the new migration batch wizard.

For the migration type, select Remote move migration which is supported by Exchange 2010 or later.

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Click Next to continue. Select the mailboxes you want to migrate to Exchange Online, you can use the people picker feature (click the + icon under Select the users that you want to move) for this, or you can use a CSV file to select the mailboxes you want to move.

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Continue reading Moving Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration – Part II →

Exchange, Office365

Moving Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration – Part I

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In three earlier blog posts I explained how to implement directory synchronization and how to create an Exchange hybrid configuration:

These steps will create a hybrid configuration between your on-premises Exchange 2013 environment an Exchange Online, but to move mailboxes from Exchange on-premises to Exchange online (or vice versa) you need to create an endpoint. This an on-premises Exchange 2013 server (but it can be more) where the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) is running, used to move mailbox data from one server to another. The process is similar to an on-premises mailbox move where the MRS is responsible.

Create a migration endpoint

To create an endpoint you have to go to the Exchange Admin Center in Office 365 and login as an Office 365 tenant administrator. You can get there via the Microsoft Online Portal, select Admin | Exchange, or navigate directory to the Exchange Admin Center, and login as an Office 365 tenant administrator.

In the Exchange Admin Center dashboard, under Recipients select migration. At this point an empty screen will be shown:

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Continue reading Moving Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration – Part I →

Exchange

The Microsoft Exchange Replication service does not appear to be running.

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Last week we had a major outage in our Exchange 2010 environment (28 multi-role servers in 2 DAGs). The provisioning system (based on Quest software) did some unexpected things after a restore of the provisioning database, resulting in (lots of) security groups in Active Directory being deleted. We were relatively lucky since the default groups (Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins etc.) were not deleted, but all Exchange Security Groups (in OU=Microsoft Exchange Security Group) were deleted.

These Exchange Security Groups can be recreated using the Setup.com /PrepareAD and Setup.com /PrepareDomain commands.

All seems to be running fine, but when executing PowerShell commands against a remote server (i.e. not the server being logged on to) would result in error message. For example, it was not possible to move an active Mailbox database from server1 to server2 in a DAG using the Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase command. When executing this command it would return the following error:

The Microsoft Exchange Replication service does not appear to be running on “computername”. Make sure the server is operating, and that the services can be queried remotely.

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Exchange

Exchange 2013 Recreate Arbitration Mailboxes

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While testing with Exchange 2013 CU9 in our lab environment we utterly destroyed the DAG and after recreating the DAG and the Mailbox databases we found that the Arbitration Mailboxes were in a corrupt state. The accompanying user accounts were still available in Active Directory, but mandatory properties were incorrect. This was clearly visible when running a Get-Mailbox –Arbitration command:

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Exchange

Deploy Exchange 2016

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Exchange 2016 is the latest version of Exchange, and it’s not very different compared to Exchange 2013. When it comes to requirements, there are some differences though:

  • Domain Controllers need to be at Windows 2008 level;
  • Domain Functional Level (DFL) and Forest Functional level need to be at Windows 2008 level;
  • The Exchange servers themselves need to be running Windows 2012 or Windows 2012 R2. At the time of release Windows Server 10 is not supported.

There’s also something like Simplified Architecture. This is the Exchange 2013 Preferred Architecture, enforced on Exchange 2016. This means that there will be only one Exchange 2016 server role on the internal network, the Exchange 2016 Mailbox server. This is the same as the old Exchange 2013 multi-role server, but at this moment there’s no choice left. You have to install the Exchange 2016 Mailbox server, and you cannot opt to install a dedicated Client Access server anymore.

Continue reading Deploy Exchange 2016 →