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Sabre
Asked: 2016-03-18 18:30:18 +0800 CST

Removal of a non existent exchange server

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I have come into the position of administering a network where there was once an exchange server, and that server is no more. The company has migrated to office 365 cloud based, and there has been no synchronization past the initial migration. The exchange server taken offline but not removed/uninstalled in any capacity, just turned off and deleted (Was virtual machine)

So this has left everything it had integrated with AD, still in the AD. (2 x Server 2008 Domain controllers)

to compound this issue it appears that at one time exchange was installed, then installed again, so for each of the accounts I have a second with a "1" at the end So I have things like 

Exchange Servers
Exchange Organization Administrators
Exchange Recipient Administrators
Exchange View-Only Administrators
Exchange Public Folder Administrators
Exchange Trusted Subsystem
ExchangeLegacyInterop

and then 

Exchange Servers1
Exchange Organization Administrators1
etc...

along with a collection of objects like health mailboxes, public folders, etc...

So this raises the question, how to even begin to fix this without it becoming a "lets see what happens" time bomb.

Since all of these accounts have descriptions that read along the lines of "This account should not be deleted" it raises a lot of "what if"

So what is the sane way to even approach this project? This is the start of what will likely become a very involved cleanup project...

I am not sure how to tell exactly, but the consensus is it was exchange 2010.

Advise on where to start that is not my gut feel of "start a new AD"?

As a side note, there may be an old backup of the VM archived in some offsite backups, if I could get it, get it restored to another VM host, and back online would the fact it is 6+ months old at best just be more headache than it was worth?

active-directory

1 Answers

  1. Exchange store all its important configuration in Active Directory, this allow the re-installation of a Exchange server even if the original server is totally dead.

    What you have to do is for each missing exchange server, install a new machine with the same OS and the same name (you should be able to determine the OS from the active directory computer object), then install Exchange in Disaster Recovery mode.

    To do so you simply download and extract exchange server installation iso, then launch setup.exe /disasterrecovery

    When the server is reinstalled, then you can uninstall it, by launching the setup and unchecking all checkbox (mailbox role, transport role etc...)

    This will remove the info from active directory.

    You will easily find more info how about the disaster recovery process on the web. (in some setup there's could be some trick, like if exchange was installed on another drive than C:, etc...)

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