Recently I had to decommission the first Exchange 2003 server in our company. Our exchange organization had 2 Exchange 2003 SP2 servers and 2 Administrative Groups (each server in a separate AG). When searching the internet for help in doing that I have found the following article – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822931.
This article describes almost everything what you should do except the following:
- What to do with “schema-root”, “OWAScratch{GUID}” and “StoreEvents{GUID}” system folders.
- How to delete the first AG when removing the last server from it.
Ad. 1. It is best to rehome mentioned system folders to the other server as you did with the OAB folders and others, so their content is removed from the server being decommissioned but stays on the other one. This would be the best way to get rid of them from the “Public Folder store” of the retiring server.
This is in contrast to simply deleting the folders – I noticed that deleting these folders can lead to strange behavior: they structure is being regenerated by the Exchange after decommissioning the first server however they do not have a replica so they cannot be used. This is not preventing the public folders from working fine, however this causes errors when looking at them using “Exchange System Manager”. I do not know if this can lead to some other, serious problems but seeing an errors in ESM is not a good sign I think.
When there are no mailboxes and public folder instances left on the decommissioned server and other steps mentioned in Microsoft’s article are already done then you can remove the “Public Folder Store” and “Mailbox Store” from it.
Ad. 2 If you want to remove whole Administrative Group which will be empty after decommissioning the server, then before uninstalling the Microsoft Exchange from the server follow these steps:
- Move the “Public Folders” tree to the other AG if it exists in the current AG being removed.
- Remove all the connectors from the routing groups stored within this AG and all connectors from other routing groups in other AGs which were connected to the routing groups in the AG being removed.
- Uninstall the Microsoft Exchange from the server being decommissioned in this group.
- Remove all routing groups from the AG.
- Remove all containers from the AG.
- Remove the AG.
Steps 1,2,4,5,6 are best to be performed using ESM on other Exchange server (anyone which is not being decommisioned).