SBS Server to Microsoft365 Cutover Migration (Office 365)

Question

I have been trying to kick off a cutover migration from an 2011 SBS server (Exchange 2010) to Office365.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to get past this error. The user on both ends is the main administrator, and has full permissions to everything. Of course, the Microsoft 'troubleshooting' is useless, because they don't actually have all of the errors listed in there.

All of the users show this.

Unable to provision jobs from the current recipient. The owner recipient isn't a valid user. --> Unable to provision jobs from the current recipient. The owner recipient isn't a valid user.

Originally, the users were created on O365, but I purged them out, emptied the SoftDelete, purged from Azure Active Directory, and made sure that nothing shared the same user name or email address as the accounts being migrated.

Same error.

Created another user, granted full access, gave it the appropriate Exchange organization permissions.

Same error.

Does anyone here have any suggestions on where to go next?

Answer 1

Well, since nobody seemed to have any idea, I spent a lot more time testing variables.

1) "The owner recipient isn't a valid user" appears to be an error that happens when you try to specify how many mailboxes sync at one time, or set the total number of mailboxes to transfer. That is, try to do 'batches'. Those fields should be removed, if they can't be adjusted. It's an absolutely worthless error that doesn't mean what it says.

2) Purging everything out again, and not putting anything in those fields, gave me the error "The migration service failed to detect the migration endpoint using the Autodiscover service. Consider using the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer ‎(https://testexchangeconnectivity.com)‎ to diagnose the connectivity issues."

Needless to say, this is another garbage error. If you use the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer, it passes with warnings, but no errors. Specifically, the only warning is that https://domain.com:443/autodiscover' isn't found - but autodiscover.domain.com IS found. Apparently Microsoft has a "Fail on first error without trying any alternatives" process going.

You also don't have a choice but to use the autodiscover process to create the endpoint. However, you can then retype over the created endpoint, and here are the critical bits. A) Expand the options, and don't verify. B) Do NOT put in any numbers in the fields in how many to transfer at a time, and how much to sync at once.

Once those were done, it finally started to sync.

Hopefully this helps someone else out with their migration later

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Additional things to make sure you've done. Enable Outlook Anywhere, EWS, Organization Manager role membership, FullAccess permissions. Also, you'll almost certainly need to add the Exchange Online service module to Powershell, so you can delete failed created mailboxes.

The process for that is delete the users in the Outlook Admin, (Microsoft 365), then open the Azure AD field, go to the deleted users, and permanently delete them. THEN you can run

Get-Mailbox -SoftDeletedMailbox | Remove-Mailbox -PermanentlyDelete

in Powershell. That purges it so you have a clean field for trying to re-sync. Make sure that you don't delete your administrative user - which will have to have a DIFFERENT username from any mailboxes you're trying to transfer.

Troy

Answer 2

This is just a follow up with some additional information I found while doing this.

SBS 2011, which is 2008 Server, not R2, can not use the minimum hybrid configuration. Don't bother. It requires a higher version of powershell than can be installed on the system. I spent several wasted hours on that, because Microsoft's documentation gave specific directions on how to do the work - and all of them failed. I tracked it down to the Powershell version.

Basically, at this point in time, the only real method is a cutover migration. If you're using SBS 2011, you're unlikely to have enough mailboxes to make a hybrid really necessary, or a cutover excessively onerous.

A caveat. You -can- perform some of the required tasks if you set up a newer workstation (they say a server, but that doesn't do well with SBS controlling the domain), and do all of the migration tasks from that secondary system as a passthrough.