Uninstall Secondary Exchange 2010 Hybrid

I often do Exchange Hybrid for medium and large customers, so they can migrate to Exchange Online in Office 365.

Every customer gets a free Exchange 2013 License to create a Hybrid Server, which is a must for Exchange 2007, but for Exchange 2010 you can Upgrade to latest Service Pack and have Hybrid features without Exchange 2013. It is configured on the CAS Servers, but thats another blog for later.

When all mailboxes, Resources and distributionslists are moved, we usually at some point change the MX record. Exchange Online Protection is just as good as other spam/malware filters, but its free of charge for all Office 365 mailboxusers. Can save alot of Money compared to other expensive filters.

You might also want to create a replacing server hosting a simple SMTP Service, unless you have multifunctional printers With secure print or followme print, cause With Federated users they will be able to logon to Exchange Online and send from their own credentials. Also a different blog for later.

So, to the topic: Uninstall Exchange 2010

We start With the secondary server, and I allways start With trying to uninstall Exchange from Programs and features. It will give a Nice list of prereqs to sort out before its able to finish the uninstallation. The list can look like this:

This Mailbox server is responsible for generating an Offline Address Book. Removal of the Mailbox role is not permitted.

This computer is a member of a cluster. It must be removed from the Database Availability Group with the Remove-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer task before uninstalling Exchange.

Setup cannot continue with the uninstall because the ‘beremote’ () process (ID: 4460) has open files. Close the process and restart Setup.

This computer is configured as a source transport server for 4 connector(s) in the organization. These must be moved or deleted before Setup can continue.

We need to address all this issues before we are able to uninstall the Secondary Exchange Serve. Some can be addressed in Exchange Management Console, if not its done With PowerShell. Can be easier from the Management Console, so I like start out there. Heres a list to address these issues:

This Mailbox server is responsible for generating an Offline Address Book. Removal of the Mailbox role is not permitted.
Move the Offline Address Book to Your Primary Exchange Server: Move-OfflineAddressBook -Identity “My OAB” -Server SERVER01

This computer is a member of a cluster. It must be removed from the Database Availability Group with the Remove-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer task before uninstalling Exchange.
Remove the Exchange Server from the cluster/availabilityGroup, but before you need to delete all DatabaseCopies from alle Exchange servers: Remove-MailboxDatabaseCopy -Identity “DatabaseNameMailboxServerName”

Setup cannot continue with the uninstall because the ‘beremote’ () process (ID: 4460) has open files. Close the process and restart Setup.
Ths BackupExec holding on to Exchange Files, so in order to continue we just stop the BackupExec Remote Agent Services.

This computer is configured as a source transport server for 4 connector(s) in the organization. These must be moved or deleted before Setup can continue.
Delete all Send Connectors from the secondary Exchange Server: Open EMC, Organization, Hub Transport and under Send Connectors, you just Remove them.

Now I can continue to uninstall all Exchange features from this Secondary Exchange Server.