Moving mailboxes in Exchange can generate problems. Here are some of the hassles you may encounter and some ways to solve them.

1. If move request doesn’t complete, check the Move Request Statistics for clues on why the move failed.
2. If a move request completes but with errors, you should look at the move report for obvious problems. Other areas where you should look for apparent errors is the Event Log on the Client Access server running the Exchange Replication service processing the failed move request.
3. If the information in the various logs fail to give you the clues you need for solving a problem, you may want to improve the information in them by increasing the diagnostic logging levels on the client access server for the Mailbox Move and Service categories of the mailbox replication service. That can be done through the Exchange Management Console or the Exchange Management Shell.
4. If you’re having a problem moving mailboxes across forests, you should check the target forest to make sure it’s been properly prepared. Remember, to move a mailbox from Exchange 2010, Exchange 2007, or Exchange 2003 forest to another Exchange 2010 forest, the Exchange 2010 target forest must contain a valid mail-enabled user with a specified set of Active Directory attributes.
5. Sometimes a move request will fail because the mailbox that’s being moved has more corrupted items in it than the move request is configured to skip. In that case, you’ll want to set the Set-MoveRequest cmdlet to increase the BadItemLimit threshold.

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Despite the benefits of giving users large electronic mailboxes, many administrators have been reluctant to do so because of the costs and complexity involved. However, those costs can be reduced and that complexity simplified making large mailboxes a more viable solution with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

That’s what Microsoft maintains in a recent white paper, “The Microsoft Large Mailbox Vision: Giving users large mailboxes without breaking your budget.” In the document, the company explains how new features in Exchange 2010 can reduce storage costs, as well as improve the operation of existing systems.

What’s wrong with small mailboxes? For one thing, they require user intervention to manage. Users are forced to make decisions on what should be saved, archived or deleted in order to stay within size limits. Not only do those decisions waste valuable time for users, but they can result in important organizational knowledge being trashed.

Faced with the prospect of reviewing an onerous number of emails, some users take shortcuts to avoid the burdensome task. One typical shortcut is dumping emails into .PST files. That creates a whole new set of problems. Universal access to the emails is lost because the files can be accessed only on the machines they were created on. If the files are corrupted, oftentimes there’s no way to recover the data in them. What’s more, since the files are outside the Exchange infrastructure, they can be difficult to search–a serious problem should an organization be hit with an electronic discovery order in a lawsuit.

One way Exchange can reduce the costs associated with larger mailboxes is by allowing organizations to substitute lower performance, higher capacity disk storage for high performance, lower capacity disks.

Continue reading Creating large mailboxes with Exchange 2010