Mailbox Archiving State = 3

[KeirL]

Hi

Can someone offer me a summary of what the status of  'Mailbox Archiving State = 3' actual means and it's implications?

We have an EV10 environment which was initially configured on Exch2007 but this was upgraded to Echange 2010 before user mailboxes were enabled. Journalling had been switched on but then the task stopped so essentially not really in production at all. Having brought the Exchange 2010 environment into EV a two node active active DAG I'm getting a lot of 'mapi session' ('Unable to get exclusive access to the MAP thread pool'   and  'Could not get a mapi session from the session pool' etc) errors and ran the SQL commands to look at the Mailbox Archiving State and it retruned several mailboxes two of which were the system mailboxes (1 from each DAG node).

I was just interested to understand if this may be the cause of the MAPI errors and if it's just simply a case of recreating the system mailboxes - or if I should be taking different actions. Or perhaps this would be a blind avenue for me....

I have Outlook 2007 Sp2 with the correct hotfix installed to bring the threads from 32 to 100 and I have 6 runnning tasks all with the default 5 connections. One other things I'm unsure of is that I have a lot of Vaultmbxagent profiles in Outlook on the EV server. About 25 for DAG1 but only 12 for DAG2.... is this normal and why does one DAG have twice the amount of the other DAG?

Thanks in advance for any clarification

KR

Keir

[AKL]

Mailbox State = 3 indicates that the mailbox has an existing archive to which it can be "Re-linked", we generally refer this state to Re-link.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/mbx-archiving-state-mbx-exchange-state

Quick confirmation, Did you have SynchInMigrationMode set on EV servers while migrating user mailboxes from one server to another?

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH48928

Also, you can refer to Whitepaper "Managing Exchange Migrations with Enterprise Vault" for more details around same.

I will recommend to install Outlook 2007 SP3 (in place of SP2 + Hotfix) as it is more effective with MAPI threading issue mentioned here.

• With Outlook 2007 SP3 - You need to implement registry http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952295
• With Outlook 2007 SP2: You need to implement above registry and two hotfixes:
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951995
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968858
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2475891

Refer to compatibility guide for more details around same (Page 18/19)

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH38537

[GertjanA]

0 = new, 1 = enabled, 2 = disabled, 3 = relinked
3 you get when you moved mailboxes to another server.

The mapi errors can be resolved by restating the task-controller service regularly. There are some regkeys to do the 'automatically'. Check this http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH68433 and this one http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH49069

As for the profiles, these should be removed automatically after (if i recall correct) 3 days.

You can change that using a regkey, see http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO58271

[Jeff_Shotton]

mailboxarchivingstate = 3 means that the mailbox has been migrated, or is being set up.

Generally this is something you get when you have a mailbox which is recreated on another system, i.e the mailbox GUID is not preserved and the LegacyMBXDN is not preserved. Is there a similar (duplicate) entry?

How did you move the mailboxes (or did you recreate them?)

And do you see errors like this?

Event Type:        Warning

Event Source:    Enterprise Vault

Event Category:                Agent Client Broker

Event ID:              3349

Date:                     08/05/2012

Time:                     01:21:10

User:                     N/A

Computer:          EV8-EV

Description:

A new mailbox already has an entry in the Enterprise Vault database.

New mailbox: /o=First Organization/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=Test1

Existing entry: Test1

Reason for conflict: The new mailbox contains Enterprise Vault settings for the existing entry

Set the SynchInMigrationMode registry value in order to process this mailbox. See the documentation for further details.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://evevent.symantec.com/rosetta/showevent.asp?EvtID=3349

The system mailbox shouldn't need to be provisioned because you are not actually archiving from it, but it does need to be on the exchange server that you are archiving from.

The mailbox agent profiles should be cleaned up as EV goes along, or re-used. Having a few orphaned ones might be an indiciation that there were problems connecting to that particular DAG so the connections were abandoned and not re-used. They should be cleaned up after a time according to the profileexpire registry key : http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH49069

I've seen Outlook installs that appeared to have the hotfix in, but were a bit messed up. It would be cleaner to just use Outlook 2007 sp3, which contains the hotfix.

Have you got the DSServer registry key set? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319206

Regards,

Jeff

[KeirL]

Great info - many thanks

So to answer some of the questions:

We didn't use the SynchInMigrationMode setting as there were no users enabled at the time. Which is why I guess I only get MbxArcState = 3 on the system mailboxes as these were already in existance - However get the impression from the replies that this is ok and I don't need to do anything here?

Restarting the tasks does work and it runs for several hours before the mapi sessions come back - but within a day archiving generally stops (the task remains running just the archiving stops). I monitor the journal mailbox which archives all the time.

The mailboxes were moved as part of the Exch 2007 - 2010 upgrade. I wasn't involved in this so can't comment much on how this was done.

Jeff- I do get 'a duplicate mailbox exists' error periodically but this is on the Journal itself which was created after the move the has a archiving state =1 and doesn't appear when I query the LegacymbxDN table in SQL

I recreated one of the system mailboxes and monitored for about 8hrs yesterday with no issues. I'll continue monitoring today and if all ok will probably recreate the other system mbx.

I'll also look to upgrade Outlook to SP3..... is it worth uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook from fresh - just to give it a clean start?

many thanks again

[Jeff_Shotton · Accepted solution]

If you are journaling and there are no duplicates then probably you should just remove the journal mailbox from the provisioning groups to avoid that error.

Generally I just stamp the Outlook service pack over the top unless there is a strong indication of a messed up install (i.e wrong patches applied to the wrong version of Outlook). I've only had a couple of incidents where a full remove and reinstall was necessary, and in both cases it was quite clear this was the only way to go as the installer errored out.

by the way, the reg keys which Gertan referred to around restarting tasks on error in the background are set by default in EV9 sp3+, and for EV10sp1+

Regards,

Jeff