Tuesday 18 January 2011

SBS 2011 Migration OS Install – Microsoft Exchange Search ExSearch CPU at 100%

We are in the process of migrating our SBS v7 to SBS 2011 installed as a VM on one of our Hyper-V servers.

Once we had completed the Migration Mode OS install of SBS 2011 RTM we saw the following:

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The Microsoft.Exchange.Search.ExSearch.exe process was keeping one of the vCPUs pinned at 100% even after a reboot.

Now, since we did not have our mailboxes migrated over we did not pay too much attention to the situation until now.

The process is still running at 100% even though our Public Folders and our mailboxes are now resident on the new SBS 2011 RTM VM.

So, we needed to figure out where the problem was.

The first step we did was to move the Arbitration and FederatedMail system mailboxes following these instructions:

Note that the text of one command is missing a bit at the end:

  • image
  • It should be:
    • New-MoveRequest –Identity “SystemMailbox{abcdeotrnsdosd-thedefaultname-nsdfrnfsfdsds}” TargetDatabase “E-DB02”

Once we completed the above steps, though we did not go so far as to delete the source SBS v7 Exchange databases yet, we still saw the process running at 100%.

So, we rebooted the box.

That did not work and the Exchange BPA came up clean as well.

We then reset the index service using the following instructions:

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The first few minutes after we ran the reset script the service went right back to 100%. Though, after a few minutes the process actually dropped down to a reasonable level.

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Hat Tip: Michael B. Smith

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

4 comments:

Justin said...

Thanks for the info!

We're still yet to have this with a SBS2011 install/migration, however we're actually having this with a plain Exchange 2010 SP1 + 2008R2 machine.

Resetting the index did appear to work ... until we installed rollup 1 and then 2.

Another symptom we are having is that the search in OWA refuses to work.

We're still trying to schedule a maintenance window, but apparently this is the solution:

setup /PrepareAD
setup /PrepareSchema
reboot after it's done.

(taken from here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-IE/exchange2010/thread/ddad5deb-327c-48e0-8a3a-7687cd551bbb)

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Justin,

Do your Arbitration and FederatedMail system mailboxes exist? Is the current setup the result of a migration?

Philip

Justin said...

Hi Philip,

No, it was a vanilla setup (2008r2+exchange 2010), then when SP1 came out it was installed.

Fresh setup too (they came from a IMAP server). Old PST's imported directly into mailboxes as far as I'm aware.

I didn't want to go too much off topic from SBS, but just wanted to make a mention that we had similar issues with Exchange 2010 SP1 without SBS.

Daryl Maunder said...

I currently have this issue after a migration from SBS2003. Only fix at present is to stop the search service.