How to Move user Mailbox in exchange 2007
Moving Mailboxes via the Exchange Management Console
Run the Exchange Management
Console and in the console tree, navigate to the Recipient Configuration
node and expand it.
Under the Recipient
Configuration node, select Mailbox.
In the result pane you’ll now
see a list of mailboxes within your Exchange organization. If this is the first
time you are migrating user mailboxes, they will obviously still be located on
Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 servers and thus will appear as a Legacy
Mailbox as identified in the Recipient Type Details column.
Mailboxes that have already been moved to Exchange 2007 servers will appear as
a User Mailbox. The different types of mailboxes are shown in
Figure 1 below where you can see that User3 is a mailbox still located on
Exchange 2003.
To move a mailbox, simply
highlight the relevant mailbox, right-click it and choose Move
Mailbox… from the context menu. Note that you can select multiple
mailboxes at the same time. Choosing the Move Mailbox… option invokes the Move
Mailbox wizard, the first screen of which is the Introduction screen
as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Move Mailbox Wizard Introduction Screen
On the Introduction screen,
select the target Exchange 2007 server, storage group and database that will
house the mailbox that will be moved. When this is set correctly, click
the Next button.
Next, the Move
Options screen is presented, shown in Figure 3. This allows you to
control what happens if the move mailbox process encounters corrupt messages.
Here you have a choice of skipping the mailbox and therefore not moving it, or
skipping a number of corrupted messages. You can inform the move mailbox
process how many corrupt messages you’ll tolerate skipping. In Exchange 2003,
the maximum number of corrupt items you could specify was 100, but within the
move mailbox wizard now, you can enter up to 2^31-1, or 2,147,483,647. If you
ask me, 100 is more than enough since if you are seeing mailboxes with many
corrupted items, you probably have a bigger problem on your hands. Once you’re
happy with your choice, click Next.
Figure 3: Move Mailbox Wizard Move Options Screen
Next up is the Move
Schedule screen, as shown in Figure 4. This allows you to begin the
mailbox move immediately, or later at a scheduled time. This is invaluable
during migrations, as it is likely you’ll want to move the mailboxes out of
hours, perhaps in an unattended fashion. If you choose the At the following
time option, the date and time is set to the current time, so you’ll
have to choose your custom time when you want the move process to start. Also
note the Cancel tasks that are still running after (hours) option,
which allows you to specify how long the process will run before being
cancelled. Again, this is particularly useful when moving large numbers of
mailboxes overnight. For example, Figure 4 shows that mailbox moves will be
cancelled after 8 hours, meaning that if they are started at 21:00, mailbox
moves will stop at 5am, thus ensuring that any users that may arrive early for
work are not affected. If a mailbox is in the middle of being moved at 5am in
this case, this mailbox is moved back to the source server; all previously
migrated mailboxes remain on the target server. Again, once you’re happy with
your selections, click Next.
Figure 4: Move Mailbox Wizard Move Schedule Screen
The penultimate screen to be
displayed is simply a summary screen for the move operation that will be
performed, giving you a chance to review the details of the move. Once you’re
happy, clicking the Movebutton commences the mailbox move process. If
you’ve elected to move the mailboxes at a scheduled time, the summary screen
will then give you a countdown process as you can see in Figure 5. You can
cancel the move process at any time by clicking the Cancel button.
Figure 5: Move Mailbox Wizard Scheduled Countdown
If you do choose to move
multiple mailboxes at the same time, you’ll see a screen similar to the one
shown in Figure 6 since the move mailbox wizard is multi-threaded. You can see
that 4 mailboxes are being moved at the same time, with the 5th mailbox,
User9’s mailbox, shown at the bottom with a state of Pending.
Within the Exchange Management Console, it’s not possible to move more than 4
mailboxes at a time, although it is possible to change the number of threads
when using the Exchange Management Shell, which we’ll look at in part two of
this article.
Figure 6: Multiple Mailbox Moves
If all has gone well, the
final screen to be displayed will be a completion screen similar to the one
shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Successful Mailbox Move
The Exchange Management
Console cannot be used to move mailboxes across forests. To do this, you will
need to use the Exchange Management Shell but as I said earlier we’ll only be
looking at intra-organization moves in this article.
Exchange performs plenty of
checks to make sure that the move mailbox process will be successful. For
example, if you try to move a mailbox to an Exchange 2007 database that has a
lower mailbox size limit than the actual size of the mailbox being moved you
will see the error shown in Figure 8. As an example of another error check
performed, you will see in Figure 9 that I managed to create a duplicate
mailbox during some testing, resulting in the duplicate mailbox being deleted
prior to another attempt to move the mailbox.
Figure 8: Mailbox Size Checking
Figure 9: Duplicate Mailbox Error
Diagnostics Logging
What do you see in the event
viewer when the mailbox move process has been performed? Well, in my testing
the same events are logged no matter whether the diagnostics logging is set to
a low or high level. In the three event log entries below, you will see that
all three have a source of Exchange Migration and a category
of Move Mailbox. The first event to be logged is event 1006 as seen
in Figure 10, where you can see that the process is getting underway. The
source and destination databases are revealed as well as the Exchange
DN attribute of the mailbox being moved which is out of view within
the description area of the event.
Figure 10: Event 1006
Once the mailbox has been
moved, event 1007 is logged as you can see from Figure 11. This is nice and
self-explanatory.
Figure 11: Event 1007
Finally, event 9354 is logged
which informs you that the original mailbox has been deleted from the source
database. This is shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12: Event 9354
Also, one other event log
entry worth pointing out is something that was first introduced in Exchange
2003. It is generally considered a best practice to ensure that users are
logged out of their mailbox when you move it. If the user tries to access their
mailbox whilst it’s in the process of being moved, event 9660 is logged with a
source ofMSExchangeIS and a category of Logons. A
sample of this event is shown in Figure 13.
