Solution for Cannot Failover Exchange 2007 CCR Cluster Because Copy Status is Initializing

Wednesday, April 14, 2010
You may find that your Exchange 2007 CCR cluster will not failover to the other node because continuous replication is not in a healthy state.  Here's what you see from the Exchange Management Shell (EMS):
[PS] C:\>Move-ClusteredMailboxServer exchange2 -TargetMachine CCR2 -MoveComment:"Failover Test"


Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Moving clustered mailbox server "exchange2" to target node "CCR2" with move comment "Failover Test".
[Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help (default is "Y"): y
Move-ClusteredMailboxServer : Continuous replication is in a failed, seeding, or suspended state on 'First Storage Group'. Move-ClusteredMailboxServer cannot be performed if one or more of the server's storage group copies are in failed, seeding or suspended states.
At line:1 char:28
+ Move-ClusteredMailboxServer <<<< exchange2 -TargetMachine CCR2 -MoveComment:"Failover Test"
[PS] C:\>
If you check the storage group in the Exchange Management Console (EMC), you will see that the Copy Status is Initializing, as shown below:


This happens because the CCR copy status stays in an initializing state until at least one transaction log has been replicated to the target node. 

As you probably know, the transaction logs in Exchange 2007 are 1MB in size, as opposed to 5MB in previous versions of Exchange.  To get the copy status to Healthy, simply send 1MB of email to or from a user on that storage group.  Now you can failover the CCR cluster to the other node.

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