I have just deployed my first exchange server 2013 in my environment. This was forced by the sudden death of my SBS 2008 which I was planning to retire soon. After following the pre-requisites, I had a brand spanking new installation and life seems good.

This week I tried to run some cmdlets but I keep getting the error "Could not find any Global Catalogs in the forest. I have tried to restart exchange but the error is the same. When I check the domain the GCs are advertising. I have three in the main site (learnt the hard way from SBS that it doesn't hurt to have too many DCs as GCs).

I need help as I believe this is a huge problem

Hi,

the DC your exchange is connected to, is it writeable?

If you run Get-domaincontroller,does it fail to?

If you get output,which DC is showing up in these fields:

Name
DnsHostName
ADSite
Identity
IsValid

Worst case you could do a repair from add remove programs.

Hi,

Please collect some events from application log for troubleshooting.

And now, I suggest to disabled IPv6 and run setup.exe /prepared in DC to check this issue.

Document for reference: Troubleshooting DNS Problems

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Bb727055.aspx

Best Re

This is the result I am getting
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-DomainController
Could not find any available Global Catalog in forest mydomain.local.
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], ADTransientException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : [Server=EXCHSERVER,RequestId=10661885-7383-4b26-b30a-024d6a5801ec,TimeStamp=6/4/2015 8:2
   1:07 AM] [FailureCategory=Cmdlet-ADTransientException] 34FA4A4C
    + PSComputerName        : exchserver.mydomain.local

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>

I am running as Enterprise Admin

can you ping any DC at all?

I Guess you have set static IP for Your Exchange servers and that DNS is correct there as well?

I have setup a static ip address and the first dns has the pdc emulator role, is writeable and is the first dc in the forest.I can ping all the dcs and I have been creating users on the domain from the EAC. They are all fine and can send and receive mail.

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>nltest /dsgetdc:mydomain
           DC: \\dc2
      Address: \\192.168.0.21
     Dom Guid: 3ecf1f3e-8779-4500-b4f6-777d7b71b0e0
     Dom Name: mydomain
  Forest Name: mydomain.local
 Dc Site Name: site1
Our Site Name: site1
        Flags: GC DS LDAP KDC TIMESERV WRITABLE DNS_FOREST CLOSE_SITE FULL_SECRET WS DS_8 DS_9
The command completed successfully
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>

That is from the exchange server.

Sorry about the late response guys my timezone is utc+2 so I can't do anything on the server whilst users are logg

did you transfer all the domain roles to a new DC from the SBS server? did you remove the referenced from the dead domain controller that was SBS, replication and all. How about all your IP settings I assume the SBS was a DNS server too did the IP address from the SBS server get removed from the exchange server's DNS. Do you still have DNS entries that resolve the SBS server name to a valid address that isn't a DC.

There are a ton of articles on how to manually remove a DC after it's crashed maybe go through that if you haven't a SBS server will have tons of referenced thought DNS including all the partitions that start with "_" in DNS. It may be picking up the GC from the ip address of the old SBS server which may be active and no longer a DC or GC.

I created a whole new domain and joined all the clients to the new domain. There is no point where the sbs was referenced in the domain. I spent a day trying to recover from backups and when the sbs wouldn't start I just started fresh.

The GC it is currently referencing (in my most recent post) is my second dc which is also a GC.

Thanks, this afternoon I got a chance to disable IPv6 and restart the server. The problem went away immediately. Next stop is fixing my IPv6 and preferring IPv4 in Windows Server.

Kudos to Lynn-Li