In my primary AD site, I have 4 Exchange 2007 SP2 Hub Transport servers. One of them needs to go offline for a couple of hours whilst it's moved to another part of the computer room. Unfortunately, we are a 24/7 operation. When I power down the Hub Transport, I need to ensure that are no messages in the queue. Does anyone know the best process for this? If I randomly check the queues of our Hubs they sometimes do have messages in the queue, not a lot, but a couple, then drop to zero, then up again, really depends on how busy we are. Is there any way to stop mails coming into the HT but let it process the ones in there? I was thinking of perhaps Pausing the Transport service, but I guess this will prevent it processing and sending messages in the queue too. Or, when a HT server is rebooted/ shut down, does it flush the queues anyway?

Well, I suppose you could do a number of things depending on how gung ho you want to be: Stop the Transport service, then check message tracking and verify that all received messages have been delivered. If not, restart the Trans service and then stop again afterwards, check message tracking etc... You could also set the SubmissionServerOverrideList on the mailbox server with set-mailboxserver to all the Hub Transports but the one being moved. Then remove the entries once its back up.

On Sun, 7 Aug 2011 02:03:33 +0000, AndyD_ wrote: > > >Well, I suppose you could do a number of things depending on how gung ho you want to be: > >Stop the Transport service, then check message tracking and verify that all received messages have been delivered. If not, restart the Trans service and then stop again afterwards, check message tracking etc... > >You could also set the SubmissionServerOverrideList on the mailbox server with set-mailboxserver to all the Hub Transports but the one being moved. > >Then remove the entries once its back up. I was going to suggest the "-SubmissionServerOverrideList", too. I'd also disable the receive connectors on the HT machine. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Hi All I was under the impression that Pausing the Hub Transport service would stop any new connections inbound but process out the existing messages in the queue? And that when a server was shut down, the HT actually tries to flush the messages out?

If you stop/pause the transport service, outbound connections will stop as well. Im not aware of any flushing when the server goes down, but even if there was, what if the next hop was temporarily down? The message will requeue and retried at the next interval. Now when the service is restarted, you will see info events in the log as the queues are rescanned.

Generally in other env that have a similar setup as yours (24x7), hub servers in the same AD, the HUB has been taken offline for maintenace (shutdown or rebooted), as the other HT will continue. Before doing this, queues are normally checked for any messages which may be in a retry state, if any, if not then generally you wont see a build up of messages in the queues and youre fine to reboot or shutdown. Sukh