I recently started to work for a new company. I have to say I love my new roll, these guys are pretty cool in terms of technology and agility.
They are predominantly based on Microsoft technologies, but there is the odd *nix box or VM in there as well, and all the comms stuff is Cisco thankfully, so I can hit the ground running there :o)
So, my first task on joining…….”migrate us off the old exchange 2003 server onto the new exchange 2007 server”. Easy I though, can use the console to do that, should only take a couple of days. “Oh, the servers are in completely separate forests though, there is a trust between them if it helps ?……”
Ah, not so simple now then. From my knowledge of exchange server 2007 (which is limited at best, I don’t know anyone else using anything beyond version 2003) the gui is no longer an option to move mailboxes. I’m gonna have to learn the exchange power shell command line tool.
The tool in question is the ‘move-mailbox’ cmd applet and takes an absolute dump truck of arguments to make it work. Googling returned hundreds of hits for what seemed to be the exact scenario that I was facing. So here’s what I started with
Permissions required to move mailboxes across forests are listed on technet :
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997599.aspx
down near the bottom. Essentially you need the following on the source and target locations
- Exchange Server Admin
- Exchange Recipient Admin
- Local Admin
Having added myself to those groups (and pretty much all the other ones that looked like they had authority to do stuff) I started attempting to move mailboxes
The first step was to define the source and target credentials to be used. These can be allocated to variables using the ‘get-credential’ cmd applet. when you run the ‘get-credential’ cmd applet it presents you with a popup dialog box where you can enter username and password. You need the prefix the logon name with the domain name and make sure you are using a logon id with the permissions mentioned above, so
$SrcID = get-credential and $DstID = get-credential both result in
Now I had $SrcID and $DstID prepared ready to use. Next I tried to move a mailbox
move-mailbox -targetdatabase “<servername>\<storage group name>\<mailbox database name>” -identity <src mailbox alias name> -ntaccount <target mailbox name> -globalcatalog <GC in target domain> -sourceforestglobalcatalog <GC in source domain> -sourceforestcredentials $SrcID -targetforestcredentials $DstID
I ran the above with the correct values and a new mailbox appeared on the target server that seemed to be an exact copy of the source mailbox albeit with a randomly generated alias name ?
Then another problem came to light. All users mailboxes were already setup on the new server and their active directory accounts were already associated with their Exchange 2003 mailboxes. And, some of the new Exchange 2007 mailboxes already seemed to have content in them so I could not just attempt to re-associate their user object with the copied mailbox :o(
I hoped that as the copied Exchange 2003 mailbox and the new Exchange 207 user mailbox were now both on the same server in the same forest and domain there would be some tool I could use to merge the mailboxes together into one…….but no such luck
Further research revealed an ‘-allowmerge’ parameter that sounded like it would do exactly what I wanted, merge the contents of x2 mailboxes together. So I retried the command with this additional parameter
move-mailbox -targetdatabase “<servername>\<storage group name>\<mailbox database name>” -identity <src mailbox alias name> -allowmerge -globalcatalog <GC in target domain> -sourceforestglobalcatalog <GC in source domain> -sourceforestcredentials $SrcID -targetforestcredentials $DstID
This however resulted in the same result. A new copy of the source 2003 mailbox on the target 2007 server that I could not merge with the original user mailbox. So I went back to Google and found that when attempting to merge mailboxes, the applet looks for certain matching criteria. This post
http://blogs.msdn.com/anthonw/archive/2007/07/05/moving-mailboxes-cross-organizations-in-exchange-2007.aspx
mentioned about matching SID’s across domains and using the admt tool to migrate users. It sounded complicated and I didn’t fancy breaking the active directory of my new employers quite this soon into the job. Hunting around a little more I found this blog entry from the exchange server team
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/11/02/430289.aspx
which states
“Check if we can match the source NT account in the target Forest (account match based on SMTP address, source objectSID and target sidHistory, and legacyExchangeDN). If match is found, this account will be email enabled.”
So….it looks like we can match the source and target mailboxes based on an smtp address…..so I added a dummy smtp address user@migration.projto the source and target mailbox and re-ran the above command and……hey presto, the content of the source mailbox was pushed into the existing user mailbox on the exchange 2007 server. Everything cames across, mail, contacts, calendar appointments….
The only outstanding issue I have is that the old mailserver had the x3 meeting rooms available as resource objects. As these objects no longer exist on the new mail server, everyone who had re-occurring apointments booked against those objects now has orphaned appointment they do not seem able to delete or cancel. I will look at purging these orphaned items when I get a chance to study it more thoroughly
So, the mail migration is now all but complete for all x45+ users with an excess of 80GB+ of mail content……..and not a single .pst file in sight :o)
