What happened to –ConfigurationOnly?

In many of the disaster recovery scenarios in Exchange 2007, one of the most useful cmdlets is the “Move-mailbox” with the “ConfigurationOnly” parameter.

With the “ConfigurationOnly” parameter the mailbox content is not physically moved but instead mailbox configurations gets changed “mailbox location”, for example we could direct the mailbox(s) to a functioning server and create a dialtone database or if we have a database with clean shutdown state (from a failed server or backup) we could mount this database on a different functioning server and redirect users to that database (Database Portability) .

In Exchange Server 2010 the “Move-Mailbox” cmdlet is now replaced with the “New-MoveRequest” cmdlet and the “ConfigurationOnly” parameter is no longer available.

So in Exchange 2010 to maintain this powerful functionality and to allow a configuration only move of mailboxes, we will be using the “Set-Mailbox” cmdlet with the “Database” parameter, for example to move all the users whose mailboxes is on database DB1 to DB5 we will use:

Get-Mailbox -Database DB1 | Set-Mailbox –Database DB5

The example above shows how powerful the Set-Mailbox cmdlet in Exchange 2010 and care should be taken when working with this cmdlet.