Hey guys, i have a problem wih my Exchange testing

Exchange configuration:

3 Sites

2 Hub cas servers in Site1

2 Mailbox (DAG) in Site1

1 Mailbox+CAS (also in same DAG) in HotSite

1 Witness Server in Site3

1 Database mounted in Hotsite with a test client.

Heres the problem:

Manual failover from Site1 to HotSite works without issue, however we did some testing by switching off the both NICs for LAN and DAG on the mailbox servers at Site1 expecting Hotsite to become the active one, and then things got weird.

From the exchange point of view all the servers were "disconnected" and database at the Hotsite is "dismounted"

From the client point of view (outlook) the clients who were on the databases originally mounted in Site1 are "connected" but can't send or receive mail. The test client who was originally mounted in Hotsite that is supposedly "dismounted" is also connected but keeps getting the message that the administrator has made changes, please restart outlook.

We're accustomed to this message whenever we failover to HotSite but now it kept popping up every few seconds as if it were failing over and then back again. Could it have something to do with the FileShare witness being a separate site at a separate location

Any ideas? thanks

check the Datacenter Activation Coordination Mode which will result to occur automatic failover over the datacenter

you can verify them using - Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -Identity <DAGName> | fl

ref: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979790(v=exchg.150).aspx