Long time no blog, I know.  I’ve got a dozen or so posts racked up from when I thought I was going to transition the blog over to Office 365 and my SharePoint installation there, but the setup just isn’t conducive to blogging without a lot of work.  And let’s face it, ain’t no one got time for that.  Or at least I won’t for another year or so.

So here we are.

I’m going through an Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013 SP1 migration…which is now turning into an Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013 CU5 migration thanks to an issue with our environment.  We’ve been rocking SP1 in all of the testing – greenfield lab installs, test lab installs with production data copies, etc.  All were rocking along (minus a SYSVOL issue in both the test lab and production), until the production install came along, and our in-house Identity Management system decided that it would find the new OU created by Exchange 2013 Sp1 (“domain\Microsoft Exchange System Objects\Monitoring Mailboxes”) and promptly delete the user objects under it as it didn’t recognize them.

Exchange created these.

So yeah.  Exchange 2013 SP1 doesn’t like that, not one bit.  About 15 hours total with 6 spent with Microsoft Premier support, and it was determined that:

1. Exchange 2013 doesn’t like when you delete those mailboxes.
2. We were also seeing a bug that was fixed in CU5 with health monitors not resolving themselves among other issues.
3. Wiping and reloading the server (after uninstalling Exchange 2013 from it!) is the best bet to fix it.

Now, I typically let the rest of the user community go through and find issues with CU-esque updates, but we’re looking at a fresh install in separate AD sites, a flexible cutover to production, and an understanding management team.

However, after rebuilding the nodes on CU5, they have come up clean, so this does appear to be the way to go!