AD replication delay and provisioning tasks ...

[BruGuy]

Hi there, We're moving mailboxes from one Exchange server to another. Before doing the move, we add them to a non-archiving group, then remove them after the move. Obviously we can't tell exactly when the move will be finished. Our provisioning task runs 1 hour before the auto archiving. 1. What happens when the provisioning task runs, AD replication has not yet completed and AD says that the mailbox is still on the old server? 2. Most of our provisioning group targets are "all mailboxes on server x", in that case does EV query AD or the Exchange server itself? A few exceptions use group membership. We have a couple of AD sites and replication can take a while. Thanks for any advice.

[JesusWept3]

1. Provisioning runs and has the old mailbox details, it will post a message to the old exchange server, it will fail to connect and then post an event saying that the mailbox doesn't exist on the server and to re run provisioning 2. Provisioning is purely on the AD side, so you target a user, or OU or distribution group or ldap query etc, it then looks up the user and gets the mailbox details, what exchange server it's on etc Then when the task runs, it loads up all the mailboxes that are assigned to that exchange server So technically you could have an ldap query that targets anyone on ExchA, but really provisioning targets users, not mailboxes

[BruGuy]

Ok thanks yet again. So scenario (1) doesn't cause any serious problems? Or should we make certain that the move finishes a long time before provisioning runs? After the move, users will have larger mailboxes so missing auto archiving for one day isn't an issue.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Older versions of EV it's possible for restore requests from the user to send the task in to an infinite loop but in ev9+ that's no longer an issue So what I would suggest to "emulate" this, move a test mailbox from exchange A to exchange B, don't run provisioning and try doing a run now against the mailbox and also a synchronize The types of errors there are what you will see in production runs

[BruGuy]

Ok will try that thanks.