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Jim StivesonFlag for United States of America

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Exchange 2016 Phantom Public Folder Mailbox Migration Requests

Good day all

So we have run into a somewhat interesting but annoying situation. We have a 3 node DAG that we have started to migrate from to a new DAG in the same organization. After migrating all mailboxes from a particular database, yes, ALL mailboxes of every type, we removed all copies and then attempted to delete the last copy. When we attempted to remove the last copy we received the following error:

This mailbox database is associated with one or more active PublicFolderMailboxMigration requests. To get a list of all PublicFolderMailboxMigration requests associated with this database, run
Get-PublicFolderMailboxMigrationRequest | ?{ $_.RequestQueue -eq "<Database ID>" }. To remove a PublicFolderMailboxMigration request, run Remove-PublicFolderMailboxMigrationRequest <Recipient I ... etc etc



Well, here is the funny thing. When we run Get-PublicFolderMailboxMigrationRequest | ?{ $_.RequestQueue -eq "<Database ID>" } it returns absolutely nothing. So, that is a problem since one cannot remove a request that does not exist. So after some web research we were able to find a few posts on this situation along with a potential solution. The following links are what we found: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/54fd0db4-11d3-421c-92e8-d4050338a907/trouble-removing-2016-mailbox-database?forum=Exch2016Adm and http://terenceluk.blogspot.com/2017/01/attempting-to-delete-exchange-server.html

After reading these we opened ADSI edit and navigated to: CN=Configuration,DC=DomainName,DC=local ==> Services ==> Microsoft Exchange ==> Organization Name ==> Mailbox Replication ==> PublicFolderMailboxMigrationRequests

Here we found four PublicFolderMailboxMigration Request from two years ago. This matches pretty much exactly what was contained in the two articles we found. Our questions are: Does anyone else out there have experience with this? Both articles state that they were able to resolve the issue and delete the database by using ADSIedit to manually delete these orphaned migration requests. What are your thoughts on the safety of doing this? In the past I have personally deleted orphaned mailbox databases themselves in AD but I also consider that the "Nuclear Option" and I like to avoid doing so. Does anyone know of another way to resolve this issue?



Any and all input will be greatly appreciated.
Avatar of Saif Shaikh
Saif Shaikh
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Yes you can delete it it's safe to delete since the request is 2 yrs. old and will not impact the production.
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ASKER

Justa bit more information:

Get-PublicFolderMailboxMigrationRequest does not return anything, the dates on the request objects in AD are two years old. However, the Public Folder mailboxes the reference do still exist. As a matter of fact, I just successfully migrated them to a new database a few days ago.
Deleting the orphaned objects in AD allowed us to remove the Database.
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Saif Shaikh
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