We currently have a domain where there are five DC's, we'll call them servers A thru E. Servers D & E are new Win 2k8R2 domain controllers, and servers A-C are Windows 2003 R2 domain controllers. All five are DC's now, and we've moved the FSMO roles to server D, and we want to demote servers A-C. We have Exchange 2007 SP2 installed and running in the domain (none of the Exchange server roles are on a DC). I have set the Exchange environment to use server D as the Configuration DC instead of just picking one. Are there other things I should be concerned about, specifically, when you get-exchangeserver in our environment, StaticDomainControllers and StaticGlobalCatalogs are null and my StaticConfigDomainController is not null, but it's not what I set it in the GUI. Should I set those to be servers D and E, or should I set StaticExcludeDomainControllers to be servers A-C, and should I set those on all three of my Exchange servers (one MB role, one CAS/HUB, and one edge). I probably don't have to worry about the edge, but do I even have to worry about the other two, or am I being too paranoid - can I just demote servers A-C without worrying about any Exchange downtime? Thanks for the guidance. - Joe

Why do you manually select a DC? That really reduces your fault tolerance. I can't think of a compelling reason to do that. Exchange 2007, or Exchange 2010 for that matter, will work fine with DCs from Windows 2003 SP1 and later. You don't have anything to worry about. Let Exchange pick the DCs it wants to use.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Hi, Exchange can find the Domain Controllers in the network atuomatically, we can check event 2080 to see if Exchange has contact all the DCs. So, for your issue, I recommend you to clean static DC/GC and wait to see if any error would occur. If you problem occur, please feel free to post here. Regards, XiuPlease remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

I haven't set those fields at all - so Exchange is choosing the DC's. My concern is it will be tied to one of the DC's I'm demoting and cause some downtime. I'm wondering if I should set them knowing that a few of my DC's will be demoted to minimize that. So my thought is set them now, do the demotion, and then change it back to null letting Exchange then pick from the two DC's that are left. Or is all this work too much and Exchange will gracefully handle DC demotion causing no downtime? Thanks. - Joe

Right now it sees all five DC's, and it's current set to choose the DC automatically, and life is good. But I'm going to demote three of those five DC's soon, and I'm sure it will be between those scans to find my available DC's, so my concern is that let's say at 10am, Exchange scans, and finds five DC's, and at 10:02am I demote one of those - will Exchange try and talk to it, and if it does, and it can't, will it gracefully move on? Thank you.

That shouldn't cause you problems. I would demote it during off-hours though.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Thank you. We will be doing it off hours - we also set the DC's that we're demoting to no longer be GC's.