Hi All,
I recently inherited an environment that's had a handful of admins working on it, all of whom had varying competency levels and poor documentation habits (this story is pretty much a cliche by now, isn't it?). Personally, I have a few years of experience administering AD and Exchange in a DFL of 2008R2, but things were mostly set up correctly in that environment and I typically didn't have to dig in too deeply. I'm working on some training to improve my knowledge, but at the moment I'm definitely still lacking in many areas. I've been asked to install some shiny new 2012 servers, retired the old 2003 DC and 2008 DC, raise the domain functional level, and in general get our environment at my new employer up to date.
In the past, this environment was migrated from a 2003 Exchange server, possibly to a 2007 at some point, and now is running on a 2010SP3. One or both of the previous iterations of Exchange was running on the 2003 domain controller that until a week ago was the holder for all FSMO roles in the domain. I have the new DCs spun up, joined, and replicating. I'm ready to remove the old 2003 DC. I decided to simply shut it down for a few days before doing anything more difficult to undo. When I shut it down to make sure things still work without it, Exchange breaks. I can fire it back up again and Exchange works.
I have been told by other people in the organization that they remember a previous admin saying something about needing to keep some service routing through the old exchange server (the 2003 DC) to make it work, and if I run an organizational health report in the EMC, it comes up with 2 servers. The problem is that in server management, I only see the 2010 exchange server present, so I don't know what's relying on the 2003 machine. It sounds like the previous people also did a lot of messing with DNS that they didn't quite understand too, so it's possible this isn't even directly an Exchange issue. Since I'm seeing 2 servers reported when there should only be one however, that seems like a really good place to start.
Anyone have any ideas?