IT Support

We had an issue when attempting to add a database copy for any mailbox databases in a new DAG. We received one of the following errors every time, regardless of the source or destination server.

The seeding operation failed. Error: An error occurred while running prerequisite checks. Error: The specified database isn’t configured for replication and therefore cannot be used to perform seed operations.

The seeding operation failed. Error: An error occurred while performing the seed operation. Error: An error occurred while processing a request on server ‘MailboxServerName’. Error: Database ‘6060c9ac-363a-4e52-a02e-ba749625e8ea’ was not active on source server ‘MailboxServerName’. [Database: Test3, Server: MailboxServerName.domain.com]

After closing out the dialog box we found that the database showed multiple copies, but that the copy was in a failed and/or suspended state.

We troubleshot this and found that the client’s several domain controllers were not replicating information as quickly as we were used to. To help with this, we set the preferred domain controller to a global catalog DC residing in the same network using the following command:

Set-ADServerSettings -PreferredServer server.domain.com

This seemed to help some other minor ECP errors where we felt like IIS was thinking faster than AD could keep up, but this did not remove the errors we saw when creating a database copy.

The solution was to walk away and wait for about 30 minutes and on return we found that some of the mailboxes cleaned up on their own and went to a healthy state. For the majority that didn’t resolve themselves we fixed them in ECP by selecting the database and on the right pane click “Update” under the database copy that failed.

In the dialog box that followed we did not specify a source server, continued, and the mailbox replicated successfully.

If we failed to wait, and clicked “Update” right after one of the errors, the re-seeding would fail, so be patient!

9 Comments

Louis Dobson on April 13, 2016 at 6:29 pm

Just having the same, so that’s reassuring!
- JJ on August 15, 2016 at 11:10 am
  
  Same!
Mark Ayres-Russon on February 23, 2017 at 9:22 am

This was driving me nuts, three databases copied and two wouldn’t. This sorted my issue. Thank you very much.
Younes on March 20, 2017 at 8:19 am

thanks , worked like a charm
Ben on March 23, 2017 at 12:20 am

Problem sorted – thanks for posting this!
Rob on May 23, 2017 at 5:38 am

Latest install of Exchange 2016 on server 2016 here.

Had countless problems trying to copy the database to the DAG, eventually landed here from google. It’s copying – very slowly – but getting much further than before, thanks!
sirhan on June 7, 2017 at 6:20 pm

this helped me fix my DAG issue. thanks much
Spinny2015 on June 17, 2017 at 6:57 am

Thank You for documenting this!!

It was driving me nuts making me think there was something seriously wrong. All I had to do was give it time.
ak on November 13, 2017 at 4:24 pm

Thank you for posting this. I was adding a new mailbox to a DAG on a new drive and received error, failed to mount DB, could not find GUID etc, restart exchange store. After waiting 30 mins and clicking on update on the passive suspended copy database in ECP &, choosing the source server, operation completed successfully. Refreshed ECP and the new DB was showing healthy in DAG. This did not require to reload of mail store. Thanks