Hi All,
As part of my Exchange 2016 blog posts I was preparing a Mailbox Database in Exchange 2016 and wanted to delete the Default Mailbox Database. Based on past experience I always check to make sure there are no mailboxes, arbitration mailboxes, archive mailboxes or public folder mailboxes in the database. As a default database in an Exchange organisation with Exchange 2013 servers, I didn’t expect anything to be in the database, and as the below shows. There wasn’t.
So I go to delete the mailbox database, but it fails…
OK…reading the text through shows nothing new…and I checked everything before I attempted to remove the database. So what is preventing me?
Turns out there is a Monitoring mailbox, that also needs to be moved.
Now…I don’t recall ever having to do this in Exchange 2013 (it may be the case) but I moved the monitoring mailbox to another database…and I still could not remove the mailbox database!!
Turns out…there’s an AuditLog mailbox that also needs to be moved. Moved this mailbox to another mailbox database and finally!! The mailbox database could be removed.
As the big red wall of text doesn’t fully help, below are my recommended checks to run before removing a mailbox database in Exchange 2016:
Get-Mailbox -Database <Database Name>
Get-Mailbox -Database <Database Name> -Archive
Get-Mailbox -Database <Database Name> -Arbitration
Get-Mailbox -Database <Database Name> -PublicFolder
Get-Mailbox -Database <Database Name> -Monitoring
Get-Mailbox -Database <Database Name> -AuditLog
If any mailboxes are found, append the following the move the mailboxes to another database:
| New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase <Database Name>
Hope this helps some of you out,
Matt
*Credit to Must be Geek for their initial post that helped me out.
