Saturday, April 25, 2009

Online Mailbox Moves with the Exchange Management Shell

A cool improvement revolving around mailbox moves in Exchange 2010 is that they by default are done in so called online mode. That is the Outlook client won’t be disconnected while a user’s mailbox is being moved. Only end-user impact is that with Outlook 2003/2007, the user is asked to restart Outlook after the mailbox moved has been completed.

There’s still support for the Move-Mailbox cmdlet, but in Exchange 2010 you’re supposed to use the New-MoveRequest and Complete-MoveRequest cmdlets when performing mailbox moves.

To move one mailbox enter: New-MoveRequest –Local –TargetDatabase

Note
It’s not required to specify a target database, if you don’t one will be picked randomly.



While mailboxes are moved, you can type Get-MoveRequest | fl to see the status for the mailbox move.



When the mailbox data has been moved to another mailbox database, you can finish the move using Complete-MoveRequest . Note this is the command that will trigger the warning in the end-user’s Outlook client in regards to the requested restart.

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