Exchange 2007 Interop RGC Connector Foo
When upgrade from Exchange 2000 or 2003 to Exchange 2007 you must perform a transition. Mainly because you can not upgrade the binaries on the Exchange 2003 box to 2007, 2003 is 32 bit and 2007 is 64 bit. During the transition you will need to have the 2003 Exchange Routing Group connected to the 2007 Exchange Routing Group. This will allow you to delever mail to recipients on both platforms and keep business continuity. You connect the two with a Routing Group Connector and I advise you use the Exchange Manager Console to manage them.
Generally when you install the Hub Transport Role it will ask you to create a Routing Group Connector in the GUI Wizard. However if you are like me and move roles around you will find the connector is broken. So first we need to learn how to test it. Pretty simple make a new user’s mailbox on the Exchange 2007 unit and from a mailbox located on Exchange 2003 unit send a piece of mail. If it works the Exchange 2007 user’s mailbox will have the email. Now create an email on the Exchange 2007 unit and send it to the user on the exchange 2003 unit. This is the quickest way to check the Routing Group Connectors, granted other problems can exist like the connector permissions.
If it fails you will need to delete the connector and recreate the connector. So first let us examine the connectors. You can use the “Get-RoutingGroupConnector” to display any existing Routing Group Connectors. By attaching an “fl” to the end of the command we can get full details “Get-RoutingGroupCOnnector | fl”.
Using the “Remove-RoutingGroupConnector” command we can remove any broken Routing Group Connectors. We will get to that in a minute however before you create a new “Interop RGC” connector” you need to verify that you have performed the “How To Suppress Link State Updates” Technet article on Exchange 2003. Then Identify the Bridge Head server in your 2003 and 2007 Exchange groups, these will be the connector endpoints.
Now using the “Remove-RoutingGroupConnector” command remove the existing connector.
example: Remove-RoutingGroupConnector -identity “connector name or GUID”
Now to create the two connectors to move mail in both directions using the “New-RoutingGroupConnector” command.
example: New-RoutingGroupConnector -Name “Interop RGC” -SourceTransportServers “Ex2007Hub.example.com” -TargetTransportServers “Ex2003.example.com” -Cost 100 -Bidirectional $true -PublicFolderReferralsEnabled $true
That will create a bidirectional link between the two servers however now we have the problem of removal, when you are done with the Exchange 2003 unit. If you perform a “Remove-RoutingGroupConnector” on the “Interop RGC” connector it will fail with the error of Multiple Instances.
example: Remove-RoutingGroupConnector -identity “Interop RGC”
Not a problem you can handle this two ways: The first is to delete the link from the 2003 Echange Server Manager, the second is the correct way. Use the command “Get-RoutingGroupCOnnector | fl” to display the full GUID from the 2007 EMC and then delete each connector by their GUID. This is the best way as the EMC will gracefully destroy the connectors and supress future errors.
example: Remove-RoutingGroupConnector -identity “Connector GUID”