Cross-site moves: The importance of proper ADC Connection Agreements
It’s now been about a year since Exchange 2003 SP1 released, and cross-site, mixed-mode mailbox moves were introduced. In that time, I think folks have really started to get the hang of how it works and what needs to be in place to ensure successful moves.
That said, there’s one topic that I’ve seen popping up more and more frequently over the past few months (perhaps it’s just because some of the other common questions are starting to recede in volume as more and more documentation hits the web).
“Why won’t my stub objects go away?” (or its close cousin — “why do I keep getting NDRs long after I moved the mailbox?”)
Ok, so you might say “hey Evan, didn’t you already cover that in this post”
Yup. That post covers the under-the-hood details of the move, and will probably help you understand where the process is breaking down. Have a look at it if you haven’t yet.
But, I’ve had it brought to my attention that there’s one area of this post that I might not have emphasized enough: You Have To Have The Proper Connection Agreements In Place!
Almost every step in the cross-site, mixed-mode mailbox move process relys on the proper ADC connection agreements being there. The Exchange Deployment tools (download here) guide you through the whole process, and actually have you run the “ADCTools” to create and confirm the proper CAs several times during the process.
This is very important. If you don’t have the proper ADC Connection Agreements in place, you will run into very weird “blocking” problems where objects don’t get created/deleted/updated, etc.
One specific case I’ve had brought to my attention is the scenario described in KB.888032. This is the case where you have a “pure” Exchange 2003 site (ie - a site with only E2k3 in it, no 5.5… no SRS). In this scenario, another site has an SRS that “owns” this pure E2k3 site. Various updates for the “5.5 view” of this pure E2k3 site have to be handled by this particular “owning” SRS. But since it’s a “pure E2k3” site, it’s really quite easy to forget that even this site needs to have a CA too (and that it needs to point to this SRS in another site.. an altogether confusing situation for most people!)
So, in summary, if you’re running into problems with the “transition” part of your cross-site, mixed-mode mailbox moves, I suggest you start with the following:
1) Have a look through my original detailed process post and see where you’re getting stuck.
2) Make sure you’ve run the ADCTools and/or confirmed your CAs are correct
3) Have a look through KB.888032 to make sure it’s not the issue you’re hitting