How to increase concurrent Local Mailbox move on Exchange Server 2010

Performing Mailbox moves in Exchange 2010 can be a rather tedious procedure. If you’re migrating a large store, this is a long period of time to wait. By default the number of concurrent mailbox moves is set to 2. Let’s change that amount to 5. Beware of this configuration because it is overly high as it could cause a severe impact on the Exchange infrastructure. Also you have to do this change on all the Client Access Servers.

First locate MSExchangeMailboxReplication.exe.config file which is located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\V15\Bin\MsExchangeMailboxReplication.exe.config (default program path unless you change it during the installation)

Open the config file with text editor such as Notepad. And locate below entries and increase the values accordingly. (Also note that the setting appears twice in the notepad. The first settings is commented out with <!– and –>, make sure you get the right setting.)

Default Values

MaxActiveMovesPerSourceMDB = “5”
MaxActiveMovesPerTargetMDB = “2”
MaxActiveMovesPerSourceServer = “50”
MaxActiveMovesPerTargetServer = “5”
MaxTotalMovesPerMRS = “100”

New Values

MaxActiveMovesPerSourceMDB = “10”
MaxActiveMovesPerTargetMDB = “10”
MaxActiveMovesPerSourceServer = “50”
MaxActiveMovesPerTargetServer = “40”
MaxTotalMovesPerMRS = “250”

Now restart the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service.

Now you can start the mailbox move process. You can also suspend current mailbox moves and follow above steps and resume the mailbox moves. Mailbox moves on Exchange Server is very disk I\O intensive process and you should adjust these settings gradually for any specific hardware limitations as in your environment.