Long restart times - is it normal? 1

[tmckeown]

Hi,
We now have two Exchange 2003 servers. I've noticed that when I need to do a reboot of the server (due to hotfixes, etc.) that they both take anywhere from 15-30 minutes to fully restart. When I select restart, they display the "shutting down" screen for at least 10 minutes before they actually restart. This may be normal, but I wanted to check. Note that both servers are DCs and global catalog servers. This restart problem has always existed, so maybe it's not a problem.

Thanks,

 

[PScottC]

That's a bit slow. You may want to manually shut down services first to make the shutdown quicker.

Shut down services in this order:

AV Services (Whatever you are using)
MSExch Information Store
MSExch MTA Stacks
MSExch Routing Engine
MSExch System Attendant
MSExch Management"

The long part of the reboot should be on the restart.

Also, the size of the MB and PF stores determines how long the Information Store service takes to shut down.

PSC

Governments and corporations need people like you and me. We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people out there who have no idea what's going on are the cattle. Mooo! --Mr. The Plague, from the movie "Hackers

 

[tmckeown]

Thanks for the tip. I'll try that.

 

[Loki1973]

I've seen it happen.

As soon as Exchange is installed (already with 5.5 btw) the system takes long to shutdown.

If you stop the services individually prior to a reboot it saves some time, but not much.

Perfectly normal although frustrating some times. I think it's the ESE that needs proper shutting down.

 

[PScottC]

Oh... I have one other comment. On systems that were in-place upgraded from Windows NT4 / Exch 5.5 can be extremely slow to reboot. A clean build on a second server would probably be a good idea if that is the case.

PSC

Governments and corporations need people like you and me. We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people out there who have no idea what's going on are the cattle. Mooo! --Mr. The Plague, from the movie "Hackers

 

[tmckeown]

Thanks for the replies. This was a new build. We have an Exchange Standard server and we were hitting the 16GB limit too often, so I built a new Enterprise server. We really didn't have any problems with the old server. It is a dual 3GHZ Xeon, just like the new one, but the new machine has SCSI drives instead of SATA for the RAID 5 array. I figured that I might get a bit better performance with SCSI, so I made the new machine. All that is left is to move the mailboxes over to the new Exchange server.

I've noticed that both of the computers are slow to shutdown and reboot. I was just checking to make sure this was fairly normal. The slowdown might also have something to do with both Exchange servers being DCs as well. We found that we got much better performance from Exchange when the box was also a DC.

Thanks,

 

[PScottC]

Oh... Yes. I have found that 2003 DC's take a while to shutdown and restart.

PSC

Governments and corporations need people like you and me. We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people out there who have no idea what's going on are the cattle. Mooo! --Mr. The Plague, from the movie "Hackers

 

[fs483]

Yup, I experience the same long delays on shutdown and boot up. I always manually stop all the exchange services before rebooting. When I remember to shutdown the services manually, it takes about 5 minutes before the system starts to reboot but if I click on restart before stopping the services, it will take as much as 20 minutes and during that time, I kick myself so that I can remember to do it next time ! I read that you can modify the shutdown/restart sequence to first stop the exchange services and then start the shutdown. There are at least 3 ways I can think of : batch file that runs net stop services, a vbscript and there's a way to modify the registry..

 

[hunterdw]

I too had the same problem of long reboot on Exchange 2003 when it was a DC and GC.

I took off GC and it went from 20 mins to about 12.

I took it off DC (dcpromo) and it went from 12 to about 4

Dell PowerEdge 2650, all SCSI U320 in RAID, 3gigs ram, Server 2003 Standard SP1, Exchange 2003 Enterprise SP1.

--DW

 

[Tightpants]

We have two servers and they take a long time to reboot if you do both at the same time. However if you always only boot one they normally reboot in about 10 mins.

 

[jthomson]

This is down to the fact that you are running DC's on the Exchange Servers. When the DC shuts down, then the AD services are shutdown first. This causes the exchange services to basically time out (think it is 20 mins) as they cannot contact the DC on shutdown.

There is a MS article which describes this behaviour, and unfortunately there are only 2 options:

1. Remove DC role from the servers.
2. Create a batch file that stops the Exchange services, and run this before shutting the server down.

 

[readkab]

If you copy the following text into a text file and save it with a .bat name. It will create a nice little program to restart your exhange system.

===========================================================

@ECHO OFF
ECHO.
ECHO Please select...
ECHO.
ECHO R - Reboot
ECHO S - Shut Down
ECHO A - Abort Shutdown
ECHO Q - Quit
ECHO.

CHOICE /C RSAQ

IF ERRORLEVEL 4 GOTO END
IF ERRORLEVEL 3 GOTO ABORT
IF ERRORLEVEL 2 GOTO SHUTDOWN
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO REBOOT
IF ERRORLEVEL 0 GOTO END
GOTO END

:ABORT
shutdown /a
GOTO END

:REBOOT
SET PARAM=/r
GOTO STOPSERVICES

:SHUTDOWN
SET PARAM=/s
GOTO STOPSERVICES

:STOPSERVICES
ECHO ON
net stop MSExchangeES /y
net stop MSExchangeIS /y
net stop MSExchangeMTA /y
net stop MSExchangeSA /y
net stop WinHttpAutoProxySvc /y
shutdown %PARAM% /t 10 /c "TO ABORT, RE-RUN BATCH FILE AND PRESS A"

:END
==========================================================

Hope this helps

Palmersit

 

[tmckeown]

Thanks for the information. I did find that shutting down all the exchange services and IIS made the reboot much quicker, but also resulted in some services not restarting. I had to manually go in and restart them.

I'm going to start another thread on best practices for Exchange servers. i have a few more questions, but I don't want to change topics in this thread.

Palmersit,
Thanks for the bat file. i'll give it a try.

What a great forum! Thanks for the help.