Saturday, September 6, 2008

How to rename an Exchange Server running on a Windows Cluster

Though I would agree that is not a good idea to rename your Exchange server that is running on a Windows Server Cluster, however you may need to it for various reasons. I did test this in my test environment.

I had two tasks at hand:

  1. Rename the cluster name itself
  2. Rename the Exchange Virtual Server name

How to rename the cluster:

  • To Rename the Cluster right click on the cluster name and choose rename.

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  • Type the new name of the cluster and you are done.
  • Check the properties of 'cluster name' resource to confirm the change of name.

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  • Take the 'cluster name' resource offline and bring it back online.
  • DTC resource would also have gone offline. Bring it online as well.

How to rename the Exchange Virtual Server:

  • Bring all the Exchange resources off line including the network name (Exchange Virtual Server network name).
  • Rename the Exchange Virtual Server network name resource by choosing properties and editing the parameter of the resource.

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  • Bring the Exchange Virtual Servername and Exchange Virtual Server IP address resources online.

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  • Delete the Exchange Virtual Server System Attendant resource. It is necessary because a Windows Cluster server can only run a single instance of Exchange Virtual Server.

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  • All other dependant resources should also be deleted. choose Yes to do so.

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  • Move all the databases and log files to an alternate location. If you do not do so Windows will not let you create the System Attendant resource and will complain that the exchange data directory is not empty.

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  • Create a new System Attendant resource and all other dependant resources would be created automatically.
  • Bring all the resources online once and check everything is fine in the cluster administrator.

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  • Now open Exchange System Manager and you should see both the new and the old Exchange Servers listed.

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  • If you try removing the old server, Exchange would complain that some users still exist on the server and you cannot remove the Exchange Server.

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  • Use the following article to find all the users whose AD attributes for current mailbox server has not yet been update to the new server and rip off the Exchange attributes from all these users.

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  • Put a check mark against the box "This database can be overwritten by a restore" found under Mailstore -> Properties -> Database tab. Do this for all the information stores in the new Exchange Virtual Server.

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  • Take the System Attendant resource offline from the cluster.
  • Copy back all the exchange database and log files that you had copied earlier to an alternate location.
  • Bring back the System Attendant and all other resources online.
  • Check the Mailstore of the new Exchange Virtual Server and it should now list all the users who had their mailbox on this server.

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  • Run the MailBox cleanup Agent Exchange System Manager.

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  • Once you run the mailbox cleanup agent all the mailboxes would appear as disconnected.

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  • Right click on each mailbox and reconnect them to the correct username in the AD.

Tempuser01 connected to old mailbox:

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Tempuser01 with exchange attributes ripped off:

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Tempuser01 connected to new mailbox

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  • Purge all other mailboxes such as SMTP and System Attendant from the new Exchange Server.

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  • Now remove the old server from Exchange System Manager

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-----------------End of Document-------------

Tags: Clustering, Exchange Server, Windows Server 2003

Published Date: 20080609

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