Exchange 2010 - EvacuateMailboxDatabase.ps1

Hey all,

This is just a simple PowerShell script I worked on for a customer in a case and I thought it might be useful to others out there. Basically, we needed to "evacuate" some bad databases - we wanted to move all the mailboxes out of the bad databases and spread them evenly across the rest of the databases. This script doesn't take into account mailbox sizes or item counts... it's just a simple round-robin reassignment of mailboxes from one database to the rest of the databases (with exclusions).

  # list of ineligible databases
 $badDBs = @("DAG01-01", "DAG01-06", "DAG01-11", "DAG01-16", "DAG01-20")
 
 # list of eligible databases
 $goodDBs = Get-MailboxDatabase | where {$badDBs -notcontains $_.name}
 
 $refugeeMailboxes = Get-Mailbox -Database "DAG01-01" # this is the database we're evacuating
 
 # the counter to track which database we're on
 $index = 0
 
 foreach ($mbx in $refugeeMailboxes) {
 $index++
 $index = $index % $goodDBs.count
 $string = "New-MoveRequest '" + $($mbx.name) + "' -TargetDatabase '" + ($goodDBs[$index]).name + "'"
 $string | Out-File -filepath 'c:\temp\commands.txt' -Append
 }

For safety, this script only generates an output text file with commands to run through PowerShell. You should validate the commands before running them. Hope this helps someone out there! :)

Best,

Matt

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Why not let Exchange distribute the mailboxes: $EvacDB= "DAG01-01" Set-MailboxDatabase $EvacDB –IsExcludedFromProvisioning $True Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -Database $EvacDB | New-MoveRequest

• Anonymous
  October 21, 2013
  I didn't know about the IsExcludedFromProvisioning parameter. Your script is indeed more efficient!