Trying to troubleshoot a mailbox move request that's been sitting in 'Queued' for far too long. Removing and re-adding the move request didn't help, so I went ahead looking for what actually happens during the process.

There's an older article here, which goes in very much detail. However that was written for Exchange 2010, so a couple of things need to be taken into consideration - one is that the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication service (MRS) is no longer deployed with the CAS role component, but with the Mailbox one. Also in that article it's mentioned that "When a move mailbox request is issued, the command creates a message in the System mailbox of the target database". I might be wrong here, but I though that on Exchange Server 2010+, System mailboxes refer to arbitration mailboxes; yet if this is the case then it presents a problem, since by default all arbitration mailboxes are located in the first ever created mailbox database. Conversely there won't be a 1-to-1 mapping between system mailboxes and target databases.

Taking a look at the move request itself (Get-MoveRequestStatistics -Diagnostic) it's visible that a MRS server isn't even selected, so the whole flow brakes in my case before that selection.

Hi Albert,

Thank you for your question.

We could check if CAS server and resource mailbox server could ping target mailbox (include DNS resolution). Then restart Microsoft Exchange Information Store and "Microsoft Exchange replication service" to check if the issue persist.

We could check if there are any errors in application log.

If there are any questions regarding this issue, please be free to let me know.

Best Regard,

Is it the Client Access Server or the Mailbox role component that hosts the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) ? To my understanding, in Exchange Server 2013 it's the latter.

I forgot to mention that the source mailbox can be access via OWA just fine, so the underlying database connection must be ok. Also, there are no errors or warnings relating to the move operation being logged in the Application log.

Is there a detailed Microsoft article applying for Exchange Server 2013 that details the process of a mailbox move, similar to the 2010 one in the initial post ?