1:00 AM
Paul B
My company upgraded to Exchange 2010 about a year ago. It is really awesome, and I’m glad we did. We did not, however, ever remove the only Exchange 2007 server we had. It’s just been sitting in our data center, using up power, and expensive Microsoft licensing. I finally decided that since we were in need of more VMware resources, it would be a good time to decommission Exchange 2007 for good, order some more RAM for it, and re-purpose it for VMware.
I started on this last week. You see, in order to remove an Exchange server from your environment, you have to do several things in order to make it go smoothly and cleanly. One of them is to make sure you remove all public folder replicas to your new Exchange server. That can take several days. I set that to go over the weekend, and decided to start back up today.
When I went to uninstall, all the perquisites passed. That meant I moved replicas successfully. However when I proceeded with the uninstall it failed at removing the Mailbox Server Role with the following error:
Object is read only because it was created by a future version of Exchange: 0.10 (14.0.100.0). Current supported version is 0.1 (8.0.535.0).
It turns out that after you move all replicas, you now have to actually remove the public folder database from your Exchange 2007 server. The problem is you can’t really do that from the Exchange 2007 server itself or you will get a similar error. So here is what you have to do.
- On your Exchange 2007 server, open the Exchange Management Shell as administrator
- Get the public folder identity by running this command:
Get-PublicFolderDatabase -Server YOUREXCH2007SERVERNAME | fl name, identity
- Once you have the identity, open the Exchange Management Shell as administrator on your Exchange 2010 server.
- Remove the 2007 Public Folder database by running the following command:
Remove-PublicFolderDatabase "YOUREXCH2007SERVERNAME\First Storage Group\Public Folder Database"
Make sure that you don’t just copy and paste what is above! Your environment may be different, so modify the commands above match your environment! Once you run these commands and after everything replicates nicely through your active directory, you can proceed with the uninstall without issue!
