Keeping Things Moving

Nothing is permanent: Children grow, weeds sprout, and occasionally you need to move Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes and systems. Therefore, knowledge about what you can move, where, and with what side effects is useful.

Moving Exchange Server 5.5 Mailboxes
Mailboxes are probably the most commonly moved objects in Exchange. How frequently you need to move mailboxes depends in part on how you allocate mailboxes to home servers. Most often, a user's physical location determines how you assign a mailbox to a server; when a user relocates, you might also need to relocate his or her mailbox.

Using Exchange Server 5.5's Move Mailbox tool is the simplest approach to moving Exchange Server 5.5 mailboxes. (You access Move Mailbox from Microsoft Exchange Administrator's Tools menu.) This tool will move Exchange Server 5.5 mailboxes to another Exchange Server 5.5 or Exchange 2000 Server system in the same site as the original mailbox location. You can't use this tool to move mailboxes between sites or organizations.

A nice feature of Exchange Server 5.5's Move Mailbox tool is that you don't need to involve users in mailbox moves. When a user connects to his or her old home server after a mailbox move, that server generates a Messaging API (MAPI) referral, and the MAPI client updates the user's profile to point to the mailbox's new home server.

The Move Mailbox tool also rewrites a mailbox's distinguished name (DNs) and the DN of each item in the mailbox. Every Exchange Server object has a DN that clearly points to only that object. When Move Mailbox relocates Exchange Server objects, their rewritten DNs must remain unique.

With Exchange Server 5.5's Move Mailbox tool, you can select as many mailboxes as you want and move them in one batch. However, Move Mailbox processes only one mailbox move at a time.

When you use Move Mailbox to move Exchange Server 5.5 mailboxes between servers, all mailbox data flows through remote procedure calls (RPCs) to the machine on which you're running Exchange Administrator's Move Mailbox tool. In other words, you'll be in for a long night if you use your home workstation to run Move Mailbox and a dial-up connection to relocate 1000 mailboxes. For best performance, log on to either the source or target server, then run Move Mailbox from that server. Also, plan large-scale moves for times when server usage is low: Moving a user's mailbox while he or she is logged on to the mailbox isn't a good idea.

Moving Exchange 2000 Mailboxes
Exchange Server 5.5 mailboxes are Exchange Server directory objects. In Exchange 2000, Active Directory (AD) user objects' attributes point to mailboxes, and you use the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in to move Exchange 2000 mailboxes.

To relocate Exchange 2000 mailboxes, simply select the mailboxes you want to move, right-click them, and select Exchange Tasks, Move Mailbox. The resulting dialog box, which Figure 1, page 84, shows, lets you choose the selected mailboxes' destination server and mailbox store. Although Exchange Task Wizard's Move Mailbox function can't move mailboxes between Exchange Server organizations, it can easily move Exchange 2000 mailboxes between administrative groups.

Like Exchange Server 5.5's Move Mailbox, Exchange Task Wizard's Move Mailbox process is transparent to clients. However, Exchange Task Wizard's Move Mailbox doesn't
suffer from the bottlenecks that Exchange Server 5.5's Move Mailbox does. Exchange Task Wizard's Move Mailbox transmits mailbox data directly from the source server to the target server.

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