Tuesday 25 January 2011

SBS Migration To SBS 2011 Exchange Services Fail To Start

During our migration process from SBS v7 NDA bits to SBS 2011 RTM bits we ran into all sorts of hiccups and hang-ups along the way.

One of those hang-ups was that every time the destination server would reboot certain Exchange 2010 SP1 services would not start on their own.

The two common ones were:

  • Microsoft Exchange Forms-Based Authentication service
  • Microsoft Exchange RPC Client Access

The first would be known as soon as a user tried to connect to their mailbox using the Outlook Web App.

The other one was not so easy to pick up on since the source SBS v7 was picking up the RPC calls and delivering the mailboxes to any connected Outlook client.

This was found out by running: Outlook /RPCDiag from Start –> Run.

As soon as we managed to remove Exchange 2010 from the source server _every_ Outlook client’s connection to Exchange was broken.

That is when we discovered that the RPC Client Access service was not starting on a reboot.

So, when migrating to SBS 2011, make sure to check the Exchange Services right after a reboot and then make that the first troubleshooting step when something is not cooperating as expected during the migration process.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am experiencing the identical issue, were you able to resolve? Or do you manually start these services every time the server reboots?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

A.,

Restarted manually each time until the source SBS was completely removed.

They settled down for the most part after that.

Do keep an eye on the Client RPC service as we have had some issues with that one.

Philip