Delete That Stubborn Exchange 2016 Database

Quick solution for the impatient: move/remove/disable User, Archive, Arbitration, PublicFolder and AuditLog (yes, AuditLog - new in Ex2016) mailboxes.


So you have your shiny new Exchange 2016 server, but you don't like the name and/or location of the database created for you by default. You create a new mailbox database, give it a nice name and place it on its shiny new drive.

Time to remove the default database. Well, you could technically rename it and move it elsewhere and just keep using it, but that would render the rest of the article irrelevant.

You move all user mailboxes, then what you do is:

Remove-MailboxDatabase "Mailbox Database random_number"

Bummer! That didn't work. Forgot about the various other mailbox types...



It's a new database, so no user mailboxes are on it. You check it, just in case. Then you read the eye-hurting screenful of red text and you work your way through the list of mailbox types you'll need to delete:

• User mailboxes (we covered it above).
• Mailbox plans - oh, you can't even run the Get-MailboxPlan command 'coz it's a cloud command and your server is on-prem. That was a tad misleading...
• Archives
• Public folders
• Arbitration mailboxes

You try again and say Bummer! for the second time today. All looks clear:


Time to scratch head. Aha, forgot about the monitoring mailboxes (well, they don't need to be removed in order to delete the database, but you say "well, just in case...")...:

...so you disable or remove the monitoring mailboxes:

Try again... Bummer, bummer, bummer! What else??? You read the Get-Mailbox online reference. You also read the output of Get-Help Get-Mailbox -Full. Nothing.

Then you hit the Web, spend the next half day searching, only to arrive here. Says the article:

Huh?... You saw the online reference and the Get-Help result, and they both say that it is not your business as an administrator to mess with the AuditLog parameter. In fact you couldn't even tell what it is for as Microsoft chose not to disclose it:

Get-Help is no different:



You follow the instructions, only to find that you do have an AuditLog mailbox. In fact Exchange creates one in the default database when it is installed - so the above article too is misleading in that it isn't straight forward about how you ended up having one.








You move/remove/disable the mailbox, try to delete the database and - BINGO!

Grab a well-deserved beer and start growing back some of the hair you pulled out.

It isn't the first time that (mis)documentation of the Remove-MailboxDatabase command caused some head-scratching. Tony Redmond blogged about it here. The Exchange team also blogged about it here, suggesting to use the -Verbose switch to figure out who is still in the database. But guess what: the -Verbose switch didn't work for me on my Exchange 2016 CU1 server:

Well, here we are a few years after Exchange 2013 has been released, and "the relevant team" (as the Microsoft blog puts it), despite its "awareness", chose to carry across the same inaccuracies in the documentation, adding some more inaccuracies to it in the process.