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Moving Mailboxes with the Mailbox Replication Service

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Welcome back to lovely sunny Seattle/Redmond, figuratively speaking of course.  This video is a discussion about our approach to moving mailboxes—the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS). 

Starting with Exchange 2007 SP2 moving forward, administrators can create long running move jobs for load balancing, migrating between versions, replacing and upgrading hardware and for making the jump to the cloud.  The architecture and approach will remain consistent for all current versions of on-premises Exchange and Exchange Online and for all the upcoming versions we have even glimmers of planning for. 

Moving mailboxes is a key part of managing an email service for the long-haul.  There will be updated technologies, new business priorities, mergers, acquisitions, hardware and version upgrades.  So having a robust, fire and forget, throttled system that enables administrators to accomplish this work while keeping the moves transparent to actual users (by making sure they stay on-line throughout the process) is absolutely key and making sure that the process scales up gracefully as mailboxes move from Gigabytes to 10’s of GB to 100’s.

I was amused recently to find out that one of our cloud competitors is trumpeting the benefits of their simple cloud story, by pointing out how happy users were with their ‘Fresh and Clean’ mailboxes after the ‘migration’.  By fresh and clean they meant empty.   This awesome and simple ‘migration’ simply creates new mailboxes and simply orphans the data in the original.  If providing a service that makes sure that email doesn’t get lost and is available to users every day makes sense, then our perspective is that it is also important to keep user’s mail intact as they move to the cloud.

- Perry

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks for the info Perry.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Nice info thanks. One question. When the system is so intelligent, why is it then necessay to restart Outlook after a mailbox move?

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    @steenpederen,While Exchange makes every effort to move a mailbox without having to restart Outlook, there are times where restart is required because either the client profile must be updated or the “signature” of the mailbox has changed which invalidates MAPI objects.  These latter reasons will lead to a condition where Outlook will prompt the user to restart.

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2012
    steenpedersen,  I assure you it's not for the same reason it's necessary for you to ask such questions.  

  • Anonymous
    December 26, 2013
    In Exchange 2013, it may become necessary to test the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) against all members