Exchange 2010 Mailbox Migration Overview

I decided to dogfood Exchange 2010 internally at Simpler-Webb. This is the pilot group migration. If you are a customer, you may recognize some names here. I did this via the GUI, but Powershell can be used as well. The best part of mailbox moves, of course is that they are ONLINE moves if you are moving from Exchange 2007 SP2 or another 2010 server. One caveat, if you have to move anyone back to 2007 that will be an offline move!

First, select your users in the EMC, and then select the "New Local Move Request" action

This then re-displays your selected users, and allows you to select the mailbox database.

Skipped screen - asking about corrupted items, skipping messages - same screen on Exchange 2007 move-mailbox GUI.

This is the "Review" screen:

If you are used to seeing and waiting at this screen from 2007, when you click New here you will be pleasantly surprised.

Yep, 7 seconds. Great. So they are moving now. Hitting Finish, you now have to check in on progress. This is under the Recipient Configuration, under Move Request.

Under Recipient Configuration you can see the move request and status.

If you double click on one of these and view properties, you can get more detail on what the status is:

When user moves are completed, you get a status like this:

Armed with this, we can investigate the warnings if any, and then select and right click and "Clear move request" to complete the process. The powershell for this is "remove-moverequest"

Deleting it from here will remove the move request, but we can still view the history of the move using the get-mailboxstatistics with the -IncludeMoveHistory flag:

Hopefully this gives you the information you need to manage your initial pilot users successfully. Feel free to comment with your experiences.

Finally - while mailboxes are moving, rather than using the GUI to view the percentage complete, you can use the following powershell to output status of your moves:

Get-MoveRequest Get-MoveRequestStatistics ft Alias,Status,PercentComplete -auto