Mailbox Move in Exchange 2016

Part of your job as an Exchange administrator will be to perform maintenance tasks to ensure the environments is running smoothly. One task that you will need to perform regularly is to move a user’s mailbox between databases. Whether this is to help balance out database size or you are adding new storage to your Exchange server it’s an important task to know how to do.

As with a lot tasks in Exchange this can be done using the EAC or EAS. I’ll quickly show you the process for both.

To use the EAC, login and browse to Recipients and then Migration. Select the + and choose Move to a different database.

Select the users you want to move. You can also provide a .csv to perform a bulk move.

Now give the move a name and select the target database. If the user being moved has an archive mailbox. You can select the database to move that mailbox to as well.

You’ll need to select a user to send the migration report to. You will also need to select the your desired options for starting and completing the move.

Finally, we can view the status of the move in the migration page of the EAC.

Alternatively, to perform a mailbox move using the EMS we just need to run a few PowerShell commands.

To start the migration we will run the following powershell command:

[PS] C:\> New-MoveRequest -BatchName "EMS Move to 16" -Identity "iparrish@leenu.net" -TargetDatabase "MDB16-2"

We can view the progress of the move by running:

[PS] C:\> Get-MoveRequest -BatchName "EMS Move to 16"

Once the move request is complete, it’s a good idea to remove the completed jobs by running:

[PS] C:\> Get-MoveRequest | where {$_.Status -eq "Completed"} | Remove-MoveRequest

Overall, this is a pretty simple task either way you choose to complete it. Moving mailboxes is a large part of an Exchange admin’s job and hopefully, this simple explanation will help you as you start moving mailboxes around your organization.