Exchange Explorer, duplicated Display Names, same DB

[billcouper]

I saw something very strange today.

I had to restore mailbox items for a mailbox named 'Admin' which was admin@domain1.com (example).
I went into ECP and found that this mailbox was on database 'DB15'.

I fired up Exchange Explorer, went to the 'DB15' database and sure enough can see 'Admin' in the list.
I restored the mailbox. Then... discovered it was the wrong mailbox data. What the what the!

I went to Exchange Powershell and did a 'Get-MailboxDatabase 'DB15' | Get-Mailbox' and there were TWO mailboxes named 'Admin' in this database.
One was admin@domain1.com and the other was admin@domain2.com.... both with unique Aliases, SAM Account Names, Email Addresses, etc etc

I went back to Exchange Explorer and confirmed I could only see one of them in 'DB15' here.
I started to search all databases, checking every account with the display name 'Admin' until I found the correct one in the database 'DB42'.
I restored the 'admin' mailbox (which lives on DB15) from the 'DB42' list in Exchange Explorer..... hmmmmmm

What was strange was how veeams Exchange Explorer handled the situation. For whatever reason it couldn't show two mailboxes with the same name in a single DB, so it just moved one elsewhere in the GUI.
Most customers have a mailbox named 'Admin' which made this a bit of a ball-ache.

What would be really SUPER AWESOME is if the Exchange Explorer could show something else other than the Display Name.... use something that will actually be unique!!!

[PTide]

Hi,

The request seems to be valid. One more thing - could you confirm that admin@domain1.com has never been stored in DB42, please?

Thank you

[billcouper]

Hi PTide,

It doesn't appear the mailbox has been moved before the event occurred this morning.
Afterward, I moved it to DB42 anyway, since it was a DB that didn't already have an 'Admin' mailbox

Running this command shows only the one move that I did today:

Code: Select all

(Get-MailboxStatistics -identity admin@domain1.com -includeMoveHistory).MoveHistory

[PTide]

How old is the restore point you were trying to recover from? The thing is, that the mailbox could be shown as belonging to DB42 only if it belonged to that DB at the moment when backup have been taken.

Thanks

[billcouper]

It was restored from the latest restore point, perhaps 15 hours old at the time

[billcouper]

Ok, I think you may be on to something. I found that a majority of email mailboxes from the same domain live on DB42, so they may have all been created there originally around 3 years ago.

I confirmed our setting for MaxMoveHistoryLength on the exchange servers is the default (5), so if it was moved it would show it, so it wasn't moved. However, what if it was restored from backup at some point in the past, onto a different database? It could have been on DB42 before it was restored, if that is what happened.

edit: this is the first time the mailbox has been restored, since we started using veeam around 6 months ago. if it was restored in the past it was a long time ago now.

[PTide]

Please do the following:

1. Perform FLR and mount drives with the databases locally.
2. Manually (i.e. not from FLR) start VEX
3. Use "Add database" to connect DB15 and check how many of the mailboxes are in it.
4. Disconnect DB15, connect DB42, and search for the mailboxes there too.

Thanks

[billcouper]

I'll try that tomorrow when I'm in the office, will let you know the result