Suspend Mailbox Move Request

The other day, while working on a transition from Exchange 2010 to 2013, I had been pre-staging mailboxes during the night for the Human Resources department so they could be migrated the following day. However, the next day came and they were not yet completed… The problem was that I had the IT department to migrate (they had already been pre-staged), but I did not want to migrate IT while pre-staging HR as I knew this would make the IT migration take longer.

So, to prioritize the migration of the IT department we can set HR mailbox move requests with a priority of normal and IT with a priority of high. But, depending on the settings of your Mailbox Replication Service (E:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Bin\MsExchangeMailboxReplication.exe), they all might still happen concurrently. So, we can simply pause the HR pre-stating, complete the IT department and then resume HR.

To do this, we use the Suspend-MoveRequest cmdlet to suspend a move request at any time after it was created, but before it reaches the status of CompletionInProgress. For example, to suspend the move request for my mailbox, I can run:

Suspend-MoveRequest [email protected]

Obviously suspending every single move request individually will not take us far any time soon… To suspend all move requests that are in progress we can first use the Get-MoveRequest cmdlet to retrieve all move requests with a MoveStatus value of InProgress, and then pipeline those to Suspend-MoveRequest:

Get-MoveRequest -MoveStatus InProgress | Suspend-MoveRequest

In my case, I had everyone in HR in a CSV file that I used to create the initial move requests. As such, we can simply use it again:

Import-Csv Migration_HR.csv | ForEach {Suspend-MoveRequest $_.Email}

If required, we can use the SuspendComment parameter to specify a description as to why the request was suspended.

Once we are again good to go, we simply need to use the Resume-MoveRequest cmdlet to resume the move requests paused earlier.

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