As many of you might know, we move mailboxes between different databases in the cloud to balance the load. This is done daily through local move requests automatically triggered by our Mailbox Load Balancing service.
A few years ago, we launched the GoLocal program, enabling customer data to reside in datacenters local to their geographic location (NorthAmerica, Europe, Asia/Pacific, etc.). As part of this program we also exposed New-MoveRequest to tenant admins to help them expedite the moves of individual or small sets of mailboxes. Currently the service that load balances mailboxes is used to manage these moves, and over the years our service has become quite efficient at managing the load, more so than tenant admins utilizing the admin portal or PowerShell.
As a result, we have decided to disable the use of New-MoveRequest for manual moves within our datacenters and only allow New-MoveRequest to be used for migrating to and off of Exchange Online.
We also understand that customers use New-MoveRequest to solve some minor configuration issues that occasionally cropped up, as the move would also re-stamp properties onto mailboxes, sometimes resolving issues with any values that needed correcting. In some cases, Support also applied this same method, but due to policies in place for either instance, this could often take days to weeks to complete. In many cases, a resolution can be achieved almost immediately without moving the mailbox, so our recommendation is that admins contact support for resolution of problems as opposed to attempting to fix the mailboxes on their own.
If you’ve ever used New-MoveRequest to creatively solve a problem we’d love to hear about it. We really want to make sure you have the tools you need to solve the problems you see, or if nothing else, to make sure we do!
Please expect to see this change take effect after April 15, 2020.
The Exchange Migration Team
