I’ve been AFK (away from keyboard) from the blog for a few months now. I’ve been the senior Exchange engineer on a massive migration project and it is in the clean up phase. I love the work, but I’m ready to spend more time with the family, more time at the lake, and more time enjoying nature! I also will have more time to blog about the things in IT and the world that I like to keep track of!
A caught a colleague doing the unthinkable the other day, moving mailboxes by searching for them with DSA (better known as Active Directory Users and Computers.) I was flabbergasted. Hundreds of boxes needed moving and this is not the way to do it. As I introduced them to some of the finer points of ESM (Exchange System Manager) and its ability to move tons of boxes very rapidly, their eyes widen with glee. On the trek home, I wondered how many other Exchange administrators are completely unaware of this feature. Its also available with DSA, you just have to selected multiple accounts there too.
One of the greatest features is the scheduler. This feature allows you to schedule the movement task anytime. I prefer at night after replication and backups have finished. You can make as many schedules as you like. The only caveat is that the move wizard dialog box must stay open or the task will not complete.
My preference to move all the mailboxes off a server is to have one task per mailstore. Each task is multi-threaded and processes 4 boxes at a time. With reasonable size mailboxes, it can be finished quite rapidly.
My only grip with the mailbox move process in general is that although it may report a move is complete for a particular box, sometimes it really isn’t. This MAPI move process is supposed to be complete when the move is and the flags removed (to prevent new mail, and users doing anything) so that it can be accessed. In reality, I’ve seen it take as long 6 hours after the completion dialog before it really is. It still beats anything that you can do manually hands down!
For more information on the move process, check out this entry at the Exchange team blog on the very subject.