Support Tip: Exchange 2010 mailbox provisioning may be disabled by the Operations Manager Management Pack

[System-Center-Team]

First published on TECHNET on Sep 04, 2013

~ Richard Pesenko | Senior Support Escalation Engineer

New mailbox provisioning in Exchange 2010 may be disabled if the Exchange mailbox server is an agent of System Center Operations Manager and the database free space falls below the default thresholds. This can occur even if the Exchange administrator has adjusted the free space thresholds in the "StoreTSConstants.ps1" script.

Version 14.03.0038.004 of the Exchange 2010 Management Pack (MP) for Operations Manager has a number of unit monitors that use the “Troubleshoot-DataBaseSpace.ps1” script as a custom datasource.  If the monitored Exchange 2010 database has free space that is less than the script's default threshold, the workflow will generate an alert and disable new mailbox provisioning.  Natively, the default thresholds for this script can be configured in the "StoreTSConstants.ps1" script, which is in the Exchange server's scripts directory.  Previous versions of the Exchange MP would honor the changed thresholds when running the "Troubleshoot-DataBaseSpace.ps1" script.  Changes to this script in version 14.03.0038.004 of the MP, however, do not provide for any means of adjusting alert thresholds, which can cause the above symptoms.

Manually running the version of “Troubleshoot-DataBaseSpace.ps1” that comes with Exchange 2010 will still honor the user adjusted thresholds as expected.

There are a number of possible workarounds at this time:

1) Operations Manager Administrators can disable the database free space monitors in Operations Manager for any Exchange mailbox servers that have databases where free space below default thresholds is not a concern.  Free space on these databases can still be monitored natively through the script provided by Exchange Server 2010.

2) Leave monitoring in place and add free space to the monitored database, when possible, to get above the default percentage thresholds.

3) Leave monitoring in place and run a scheduled script to re-enable provisioning on the Exchange server. The Operations Manager workflow is configured to run once per hour for each Exchange Mailbox server, so a script to re-enable provisioning would need to run at least as often, if not more frequently, to ensure that provisioning was enabled.

Additional Details

Exchange 2010 has a native troubleshooting script:  “Troubleshoot-DataBaseSpace.ps1”.  This script can be invoked manually with threshold values as parameters to alert if database space is low in the mailbox store.  If no parameters are specified at runtime, the script can refer to “StoreTSConstants.ps1” in the Exchange 2010 scripts directory to obtain the default thresholds to alert on.  The native “StoreTSConstants.ps1” can be modified if the default thresholds are not valid in a customer environment.

Version 14.02.0071.0 of the Exchange 2010 MP has a number of unit monitors that use the “Troubleshoot-DataBaseSpace.ps1” script as a custom datasource, but do not pass any threshold parameters at runtime.  The workflows rely on the default values (or modified values if the customer has changed them) in the native “StoreTSConstants.ps1”.

In the newest version of the Exchange 2010 MP, 14.03.0038.004, the “Troubleshoot-DataBaseSpace.ps1” script has been modified from the native Exchange 2010 version to look instead in the temporary folder where the script has been invoked from to get the default values.  The Exchange MP always included a version of “StoreTSConstants.ps1”, but prior to this recent change, the “Troubleshoot-DataBaseSpace.ps1” script would always ignore the version of the "StoreTSConstants" script included with the MP and instead would rely on the native Exchange version of "StoreTSConstants" for default values.  If the customer has modified “StoreTSConstants.ps1” in the past, these modifications will now be ignored by the new Exchange 2010 MP, but honored by the native version of "Troubleshoot-Database.ps1" when run manually.

This is a known issue in version 14.03.0038.004 of the Exchange 2010 Management Pack (MP) for Operations Manager. More information will be posted on this site as it becomes available.

Richard Pesenko | Senior Support Escalation Engineer | Microsoft GBS Management and Security Division

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