Moving mailboxes between different Exchange organizations (which means different AD forests) is not something that is easy thing to do. Luckily, it\u2019s not something you do every day, but when you need it, it\u2019s better to have procedure ready and tested. While authoring 20342 MOC course (Exchange 2013 Advanced Solution) I was making a lab for moving Exchange mailboxes between different Exchange organizations, and I must admit that I spent quite amount of time to make it work. That\u2019s why I decided to pull some important parts and make them available to all my readers.<\/p>\n
First, why would you want to do this? As I said, occasions for this procedure are not often, but sometimes you just have to do this. For example, if you merge two organizations or if you want to have a fresh start with new AD DS and new Exchange, while all your resources are still in old AD DS. Whichever reason you have, you\u2019ll have the same starting point which is \u2013 accounts and mailboxes in one organization (Let\u2019s call it OrgA) and (fresh) AD DS and Exchange in another organization (Let\u2019s call it OrgB). When saying organization, I mean Exchange organization, not necessarily another company (but mandatory another AD DS forest). Let\u2019s presume that OrgA has Exchange Server 2010 deployed, while OrgB has Exchange Server 2013, and we want to move mailboxes from OrgA to OrgB.<\/p>\n
Since Exchange Server is very deeply integrated with AD DS, you can\u2019t just move mailboxes \u2013 it\u2019s a bit more than that. You also have to move user objects. This can be done in several ways. Easiest thing to do is to use ADMT (Active Directory Migration Tool) which can greatly help in moving AD accounts from one domain to another, together with all attributes, as well as with password sync. You can also use ForeFront Identity Manager for this purpose, although it might be a bit complicated to deploy FIM just to do this, but if you have it in place, you can use it to provision user account objects in another domain. ADMT is definitely best choice, however, at this time, we still don\u2019t have ADMT that can move user objects from Windows Server 2008 domain to Windows Server 2012 domain.<\/p>\n
Luckily, there is a script in Exchange Server 2013, which can great help in doing this. The script prepares the AD DS target object and synchronizes the required attributes for cross-forest moves to work. The script creates the mail enabled user account in the target forest if necessary, or it synchronizes an existing user when possible. This script is called Prepare-MoveRequest.ps1<\/b>, and it is in the Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\Scripts<\/strong> folder. This script is fairly simple to use, but be aware that this script does not move passwords, so user account that you move will be disabled (and without password) when you move it to OrgB. If you can live with this, you\u2019ll be fine. Otherwise, you will have to use ADMT to move user objects, but then you should be aware that this script in Exchange Server 2010 is not fully compatible with user objects moved with ADMT, at least with current version of ADMT. This is because ADMT does not migrate Exchange attributes on user object, which can cause account in destination domain to look like a legacy Exchange account. The Prepare-MoveRequest script in Exchange Server 2013 supports a new parameter, OverwriteLocalObject<\/strong>, for user objects created by ADMT. The script copies the mandatory Exchange Server attributes from the source forest user to the target user.<\/p>\n Ok, let\u2019s now see how to do this. First, you have to do some preparations in OrgA in OrgB. In a nutshell, you have to do following:<\/p>\n \u00b7 Make sure that connection between OrgA and OrgB is reliable. Also, make sure that name resolution between domains in OrgA and OrgB is working<\/p>\n \u00b7 Establish forest trust between OrgA and OrgB. While this is not mandatory, it will definitely make your life easier during this procedure. You can remove the trust later.<\/p>\n \u00b7 Deploy mutually trusted certificates on Exchange server in both organizations. You can achieve this in various ways, I will not elaborate on this \u2013 just make sure that each Exchange trusts certificate on another one<\/p>\n After you did all these preparation steps, you should make sure that Mailbox Replication Proxy (MRSProxy) service on the Client Access server in the source Exchange Server organization is running. By default, this service is disabled, and you\u2019ll probably have to make it start. Easiest way to do this is to execute following in EMS:<\/p>\n Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -Identity "EWS (Default Web Site)" -MRSProxyEnabled $true<\/strong><\/p>\n Before executing this command it is wise to check identity of your Web services virtual directory. Default value is like in command I just wrote, but it can be different. So, run Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory | FL<\/strong> and check for the identity attribute.<\/p>\n With Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory<\/strong> cmdlet you can also use MaxMRSConnections<\/strong> parameter. The value of this parameter establishes how many mailbox moves you can do simultaneously. The default value is 100. You should reduce this number if the mailbox move is going across a slow link. If you have reliable and fast connection, you can forget about this. But, if you change the value, you should restart Mailbox Replication Service for the change to take effect.<\/p>\n Before you proceed, there is one thing that you should check to spare some headaches later. When you enable the Mailbox Replication Proxy service on the source Client Access servers, the mailbox move endpoint becomes MrsProxy.svc<\/strong>. In some cases, the IIS configuration is missing the svc-Integrated handler mapping, which results in an error, such as \u201c(405) method not allowed,\u201d<\/em> when you start moving mailboxes, and that\u2019s not something you want to see. To make sure that this will work, open command line at this path: C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.Net\\Framework\\v3.0\\Windows Communication Foundation\\<\/em> , and then execute the following command: ServiceModelReg.exe \u2013r<\/b>. This command reinstalls the handler mappings in IIS. To check for existing handler mappings in IIS, start the IIS console and then, in the center pane, double-click Handler Mappings, while the virtual directory or website is selected. Just make sure that you see *.svc there.<\/p>\n Now that we have things prepared, we will start moving some mailboxes in next part of this article. Stay there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Moving mailboxes between different Exchange organizations (which means different AD forests) is not something that is easy thing to do. Luckily, it\u2019s not something you do every day, but when you need it, it\u2019s better to have procedure ready and tested. While authoring 20342 MOC course (Exchange 2013 Advanced Solution) I was making a lab … Continue reading “Moving mailboxes from Exchange 2010 organization to Exchange 2013 organization – Part 1”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exchsrv"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p33Rch-1Q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dizdarevic.ba\/ddamirblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}