Exchange 2003, WMI, AD and Powershell - Part 5 (Querying AD for Exchange 2003 Information)

In previous posts in this series we have looked in particular at some of the Exchange 2003 WMI classes. So far this has required manual specification of which Exchange server you want to retrieve info from; wouldn't it be nice if you could use Powershell to find all the Exchange 2003 servers in your environment then run the WMI query against the results? Fortunately for us Exchange 2003 stores a lot of configuration information in Active Directory so we can query AD to retrieve what we need. There is a great article here which details how you can do this. We do the following:

Create a new directory object using .Net for the current AD domain.

$root= New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry("LDAP://RootDSE")

Use ADSI to get the configuration partition of AD.

$cfgNC = [adsi]("LDAP://" + $root.Get("configurationNamingContext"))

Create a directory search object

$search = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($cfgNC)

Filter on the Exchange Server object class - the below image should help illustrate what we are doing here. (other classes you can search on can be found here)

$search.filter = '(objectclass=msExchExchangeServer)'






Use the FindAll method to execute the search.

$ExchServer = $search.FindAll()

Finally, return the names of all the results.

$ExchServer | foreach {$_.properties.name}

Which in the example from the screenshot would produce a result:

EXCH

You can now combine this with any of the previous WMI scripts to run them against all the Exchange servers in your environment, e.g. for Top 10 largest mailboxes on each server:

$root= New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry("LDAP://RootDSE")
$cfgNC = [adsi]("LDAP://" + $root.Get("configurationNamingContext"))
$search = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($cfgNC)
$search.filter = '(objectclass=msExchExchangeServer)'
$ExchServer = $search.FindAll()

foreach ($server in $ExchServer)
{
$ExchangeServers = $ExchangeServers + $ExchServer | foreach {$_.properties.name}
}
foreach ($computer in $ExchangeServers) {
Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer $computer | sort-object Size -Descending | select-object -First 10 MailboxDisplayName,Servername,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size}

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 4.5 (Counting Users in Storage Groups and Mailbox Stores)

OK, so this wasn't going to be in the original series I was writing, but an issue came up at work where I needed to quickly find the total number of users in each Storage Group.

Naturally I turned to Powershell for the solution.

Just supply the names of the Storage Groups in a text file, use Powershell to open the text file and for each of the Storage Groups use the Exchange_Mailbox class and filter on the Storage Group name. Use the feature .count to just return the number of users rather than any properties and write to the screen the result.

$StorageGroups = Get-Content c:\Scripts\StorageGroups.txt
foreach ($SG in $StorageGroups){
$Total = (Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName -filter "StorageGroupName = '$SG'").count
Write-Host $SG ":" $Total "users"
}


Which produces something along the lines of:

Storage Group 01 : 152 users
Storage Group 02 : 373 users
Storage Group 03 : 259 users
Storage Group 04 : 220 users


Taking this one step futher you can drill down into the Mailbox Stores with similar code (this time with the names of the Mailbox Stores in a text file) and find how many users on each store:

$MailboxStores = Get-Content c:\Scripts\MailboxStores.txt
foreach ($Store in $MailboxStores){
$Total = (Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName -filter "Storename = '$Store'").count
Write-Host $Store ":" $Total "users"
}

Which gives you the result:

Mailbox Store 01 : 23 users
Mailbox Store 02 : 32 users
Mailbox Store 03 : 41 users
Mailbox Store 04 : 30 users
Mailbox Store 05 : 26 users
Mailbox Store 06 : 39 users
etc.............

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 4 (Disconnected Mailboxes)

In parts 1 , 2 , 3 we looked at retrieving mailbox information from Exchange 2003 using WMI and Powershell.

In part 4 we're going to take another look at this topic area for something slightly more advanced - how to get a list of all mailboxes which have been deleted, but are still in the time frame for 'Keep Deleted Mailboxes for: x days'.

A typical scenario might be a mailbox has been deleted incorrectly and you need to re-connect it to an AD account; however, since the AD account has gone, how do you know which Mailbox Store was the home for the mailbox?

In the Exchange management GUI you would need to browse through each mailbox store looking for mailboxes marked with the red cross. Not too bad a job if you only have one mailbox store, but if that number is in the 10's of Mailbox Stores then its a pretty tedious task.

Step forward Powershell!

Again use the Exchange_Mailbox class and this time look for the DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS value. This value gets populated after the mailbox has been marked for deletion. We look for a value which begins with "2", i.e. the mailbox has been deleted sometime after the year 2000 (there may be a better way to do this), and return info about each mailbox in this state, including the Servername and Mailbox Store Name so that you can easily track the mailbox down.

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName | where { $_.DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS -like '2*' } | sort-object MailboxDisplayName | ft MailboxDisplayName,ServerName,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size,DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS


Update 12/08/08:

Thanks to Shay Levy who has come back with a better way to do this!

"Using a -filter parameter which makes your query run on the server and return only the relevant mailbox objects". You should find that this significantly improves the speed of the query. Check the comments for this post for full details.

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName -filter "DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS is not null" | sort-object MailboxDisplayName | ft MailboxDisplayName,ServerName,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 3 (Mailboxes Over 2GB)

In parts 1 and 2 we looked at retrieving mailbox information from Exchange 2003 using WMI and Powershell.

In part 3 we're going to take another look at this topic area for another potential common request along the lines of 'can you give me a list of all mailboxes over 2GB?'

Again we use the MicrosoftExchangeV2 WMI namespace and the Exchange_Mailbox class and this time use the where-object cmdlet to only return results where the size of the mailbox is greater than 2GB - obviously you can change this value to your own needs. (Note: the value is specified in KB)

Once again very simple to achieve a really effective result.

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName | where-object { $_.Size -gt 2097152 } | sort-object MailboxDisplayName}

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 2 (Top 10 Largest Mailboxes Per Server)

In part 1 I looked at how to retrieve mailbox information from Exchange 2003 using WMI and Powershell.

Taking this on one step further along the lines of your manager asks for a list of the biggest Exchange mailboxes, we can use a similar command to get the mailbox info, sort the list by size and then use the -First parameter of the Select-Object cmdlet to bring back only the top 10 say.

Its as easy as that. Of course you could then output the data to a csv file using an additional pipeline so that the info is easy to forward on.

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName | sort-object Size -Descending | select-object -First 10 MailboxDisplayName,Servername,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size | export-csv c:\scripts\top10.csv

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 1 (Get Mailbox Info)

OK, so I had some fun making a Powergui Powerpack for Exchange 2003, but its probably about time I wrote about how to do this natively in Powershell.

There is a lot of information you can get out of Exchange 2003 using WMI. Yikes, you might say if you previously thought about doing that with VBScript; however, with Powershell its easy!

We simply use the Get-WMIObject cmdlet, use the ExchangeV2 namespace and Exchange_Mailbox class and connect to the Exchange Server in question.

(You can find all about the Exchange_Mailbox class over on MSDN. Sysadmins amongst you might think MSDN is only for developers, but the Exchange WMI pages are pretty straightforward and all contain a very nice example in VBScript where you can figure most stuff out which is available to you.)

This will return you all the mailbox objects on that server. We then use some basic sorting and selecting to present the info nicely.


Get-WMIObject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName | sort-object MailboxDisplayName | format-table MailboxDisplayName,Servername,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size