In this post, I would like to share how I got around a Mailbox Locked Mailbox Move issue. After we have successfully moved several hundred mailboxes to their new location some issues occurred with a few mailboxes.
Moves for those mailboxes could not be started with the -priority switch due to the fact that the target location wasn’t on-premise.
As a result, some of those boxes just stalled. Restarting the Mailbox Replication Service on the relevant source server did the trick. The stalled move requests could be reinitiated. Only one mailbox remained.
However, the remaining mailbox was locked. I tried to move the mailbox to another mailbox database but received the same error as with the move-request:
It seemed like the mailbox had a locked flag ( or something similar ) set in the information store of the source server that mounts the mailbox database for this mailbox. If so, I would have to restart the information store or reboot the server to wipe this flag. Not the first choice for a production server.
I never had this kind of mailbox locked mailbox move issue before.
So I started to google and fortunately found this article on dirteam.com.
The article made me confident that it is most probably locked in the information store on the source server. Switching the mounted mailbox database where the locked mailbox resides to another server just did it. Simple as that. Thank you, DirTeam!
Here the short procedure to solve the mailbox locked mailbox move issue:
get-mailbox -Identity“MailboxName” | select PrimarySmtpAddress, database
Note the database-name and display servers hosting the copies of this mailbox db:
Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus “DatabaseName”
Mount the mailbox database on another server within the DAG:
Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase “DatabaseName” -ActivateOnServer “ServerHostingCopy”
After the mailbox database was mounted on another server I was able to start and complete the move of the last mailbox successfully.
Have a nice day!
If you run into other issues with move requests this could also be of interest: