Exchange 2007 CCR: Continuous Replication is in a Failed, Seeding, or Suspended State

You may encounter an error with Exchange Server 2007 CCR clusters when trying to move the clustered mailbox server between nodes.

[PS] C:\>Move-ClusteredMailboxServer exchcluster1 -TargetMachine clunode1 -MoveComment "Testing failover"

Move-ClusteredMailboxServer : Continuous replication is in a failed, seeding, or suspended state on 'exchcluster1-db1'. Move-ClusteredMailboxServer cannot be performed if one or more of the server's storage group copies are in failed, seeding or suspended states.

This can occur when the storage groups are in a state of “Initializing”. This state can occur on storage groups in which the mailbox database is mounted but a new transaction log has not been written and closed (common when the database has no mailboxes on it or very low volume of email to and from the mailboxes on it).  You can view the status of the storage groups using Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus.

[PS] C:\>Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus

Name                      SummaryCopySt CopyQueueLeng ReplayQueueL
                          atus          th            ength
----                      ------------- ------------- ------------
exchcluster1-db1           Initializing  0             0
exchcluster1-db2           Initializing  0             0

You can resolve the issue by dismounting and mounting the mailbox databases. To dismount all mailbox databases on a server use the following command.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabase -server exchcluster1 | Dismount-Database -confirm:$false

To mount them again use this command.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabase -server exchcluster1 | mount-Database -confirm:$false

The storage groups should now be in a healthy state.

[PS] C:\>Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus

Name                      SummaryCopySt CopyQueueLeng ReplayQueueL
                          atus          th            ength
----                      ------------- ------------- ------------
exchcluster1-db1           Healthy       0             0
exchcluster1-db2           Healthy       0             0

Once they are healthy you can move the clustered mailbox server to the other node.