How To Place Mailbox Servers that are not Database Availability Group (DAG) Members into Maintenance mode

Purpose

This article describes how to enable and disable maintenance mode for Exchange mailbox servers that are not members of a Database Availability Group.

Run all commands from the Exchange Management Shell on the mailbox server, and replace <ServerName> with that server's name.

Enable maintenance mode

1. Drain the active mail queues on the mailbox server:

   Set-ServerComponentState <ServerName> -Component HubTransport -State Draining -Requester Maintenance

2. Force the transport service to pick up the state change:

   Restart-Service MSExchangeTransport

   On a multi-role server, also run:

   Restart-Service MSExchangeFrontEndTransport

3. Redirect messages still pending delivery in the local queues to another mailbox server:

   Redirect-Message -Server <ServerName> -Target <MailboxServerFQDN>

   The -Target value must be the target server's FQDN, and that server must not itself be in maintenance mode.

4. Place the server into maintenance mode:

   Set-ServerComponentState <ServerName> -Component ServerWideOffline -State Inactive -Requester Maintenance

5. Verify:

   Get-ServerComponentState <ServerName> | ft Component,State -AutoSize

   All components should show Inactive, except Monitoring and RecoveryActionsEnabled.

Disable maintenance mode

1. Bring the server back online:

   Set-ServerComponentState <ServerName> -Component ServerWideOffline -State Active -Requester Maintenance

2. Force the transport service to pick up the state change:

   Restart-Service MSExchangeTransport

   On a multi-role server, also run:

   Restart-Service MSExchangeFrontEndTransport

3. Return the transport component to service. Enabling maintenance mode set HubTransport to Draining, and it has to be set back explicitly — reactivating ServerWideOffline alone does not do it:

   Set-ServerComponentState <ServerName> -Component HubTransport -State Active -Requester Maintenance

4. Verify:

   Get-ServerComponentState <ServerName> | ft Component,State -AutoSize

   All server components should show Active.

Before returning the server to production traffic

Check HubTransport specifically in the verification output. A server whose HubTransport is still draining will not accept mail, even though the rest of it looks healthy — and nothing else in the output makes that obvious.

If HubTransport does not show Active, re-run step 3 of the disable procedure and verify again before putting the server back into service.

Applies to

This procedure has been tested on Exchange Server 2016.