Hello Friends,
We had been running Exchange 2013 CU2 without issue for some time. Patch CU3 was released, and recommended by Microsoft. The upgrade to CU3 failed, and we immediately called Microsoft Support. We were unable to run Exchange in its current state, we could not uninstall the patch as it had already upgraded our Active Directly Schema making Exchange 2013 CU2 incompatible, and we were unable to get the patching process to complete.
Microsoft Support worked on this issue for three days and nights, before finally getting everything working again and email started flowing once more. However, our Exchange server has never been the same. We immediately noticed strange issues that we have not been able to resolve, such as email delivery delays, an empty mail database that does nothing, yet cannot be removed, and other issues.
Service pack 1 arrived for Exchange 2013 over six months ago. However, we’ve been afraid to update our suspect Exchange server. This update performs yet another schema update, and we are afraid things may break once again.
We thought we might build another Exchange 2013 Server CU3, move all of the mailboxes to it, take down the old server, and then upgrade the new server to Service Pack 1. But, we’re not sure that this process is the best way to go about achieving healthy email functionality, or if it will even work at all. We cannot afford any more email downtime.
Any reccomendations?
Thanks,
Stephen Barash