ProTip: Scheduled Task to Start Stopped Services in Exchange Server

As a best practice, I've always created a scheduled task on my Exchange Servers that starts all stopped services 1 minute after server startup. This is useful for virtualized environments where servers restart much faster than physical environments. Often the VM comes back up before the network has fully initialized. When this happens, some of the Exchange services do not start properly.

This scheduled task is becoming important with the release of the January 2023 Exchange Server Security Updates. There is a known issue that Microsoft Exchange AD Topology service may not start properly on Exchange 2016 servers running on Windows Server 2012 R2. Microsoft is investigating.

I've seen this happen on several of my customers' environments. Since almost all Exchange services rely on the AD Topology service, none of the Exchange services will start. You are required to start all the services manually after every reboot. Instead, you can install the scheduled task that does this for you.

Run the following from an elevated PowerShell or EMS prompt:

$TaskProgram =  "$env:SystemRoot\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe"

$TaskArguments = '-NoProfile -command "gwmi win32_service | where {$_.StartMode -eq ''Auto'' -and $_.State -eq ''Stopped''} | Start-Service"'

$TaskAction = New-ScheduledTaskAction -Execute $TaskProgram -Argument $TaskArguments

$TaskTrigger = New-ScheduledTaskTrigger -AtStartup -RandomDelay 00:01:00

Register-ScheduledTask -TaskName "Start Stopped Services" -Action $TaskAction -Trigger $TaskTrigger -RunLevel Highest -User "system" -Description "Starts all stopped services 1 minute after startup due to slow network initialization."

It's safe to install this on any Exchange server.