Engineer's Notes

During the move from Exchange 2013 to 2016 you will need to migrate mailboxes from one mailbox database to another because you cannot mix Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016 servers in one DAG. In this post I decided to mention some best practices and useful cmdlets you may need during the move. Some users may have large mailboxes if you are not limiting the size, that is why some our mailboxes were greater than 20GB and even 30GB. It is a good idea to ask these users to delete left junk emails. One of my users removed nearly  20GB of mails and items after my request. That was great but the size of this mailbox did not reduce because all these deleted items were moved to the Recoverable Items folder. So, here is the first best practice: ask your users to delete all unnecessary mails before the move from one database to another. If you do not want to clean up the Recoverable items folder manually it would be useful to check the retention period of the source mailbox database. If the rete

This week we had been performing a migration from Exchange 2013 to 2016. This process included a migration of mailboxes from Exchange 2013 database availability group to a new DAG on Exchange 2016 servers. As you may know, there is no way to add Exchange 2016 servers into an existing DAG, created on Exchange 2013 servers. So, I had been performing these migrations and found out that a correct target database was not set for one mailbox. This mailbox migrated to a second database located on Exchange 2013. When I noticed that mistake I tried to move the mailbox to a correct database, but I did not succeed. I created a new mailbox move request using ECP targeting it to a correct database. This move request have started an initialization process and ended up with a message that 0 mailboxes were synced and 0 were finalized. The highlighted line stands for "Number of mailboxes finalized". I have migrated all the remaining mailboxes and was in need to solve that issue to decomm

Yesterday I ran into an issue related to Project Server 2016. This was the first time I used this product to publish a project and I did not expect any issues. First I have put some tasks into the project and their durations. After that I saved this project to Project Server using my desktop Project application and published it successfully. Later I decided to add some resources to the project and was not able to publish it again. The following image is showing the error message which appears in the Project Server tasks list. You get two failures: ProjectPublishFailure (23000).  name='ProjectPublishFailure'  messagetype='Microsoft.Office.Project.Server.BusinessLayer.QueueMsg.UpdateSRAMessage: projectUid = 8ebbcaa0-6506-e811-9c4d-9cebe82e29b3'  messageID='14'  stage=''  blocking='Block'  and   GeneralQueueJobFailed (26000) - ProjectPublish.UpdateSRAMessage .  name='GeneralQueueJobFailed'  GroupType='ProjectPublish&#