Is there a way to force Exchange Control Panel (ECP) to only use local Domain Controllers?  My Exchange servers are performing across AD site/subnet look ups which causes delays when making any changes.

We have multisite Active Directory domain controllers.  We have noticed that ECP is getting slower and slower with every new DC we bring online. Sometimes when we modify a mailbox it might take 1-2 replication cycles for everything to be accurate after we make a change to an user object attribute(Lastname) etc.  Everything is working, but it just can be a bit frustrating waiting for small changes to become accurate across all DCs.

Thanks!
Chris Carson

Are you sure you have correctly configured your subnets in AD Sites and Services?

I'm 95% certain that AD Site and Services are configured correctly.  Both of my Exchange servers are returning the correct site and I have only one DC per site in ADSS when I run:

nltest /dsgetsite

How does ECP decide which DC to connect to?  Is there any way to enable a debug on ECP in IIS?

Thanks,

Chris

ECP works through PowerShell.  If you execute PowerShell Get-* commands, I believe they'll tell you which DC returned the information.

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your question.

We could refer to the following link to check which DC has been connected to Exchange server:

Get-ADServerSettings | FL

Then we could restart the service of Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology to check if the Exchange connect to the local DC.

If the Exchange didnt connect to the local DC, we could refer to the following steps to check if the issue persist:

1.        Configure the property of Preferred DNS server and Alternate DNS Server to point to local DNS (DCs)
2.        Run the following command on Exchange server:Set-ADServerSettings -PreferredServer localDC.contoso.com
3.        Then restart the service of Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology

If there are any questions regarding this issue, please be free to let me know.

Best Regard,

Jim

How do you do that in EAC?  That's what he asked for.

This is exactly what I'm wondering. Powershell works fine, but it doesn' t make sense for basic user/mailbox administration.

Are there any settings in the web.config?

Best Regards,
Chris Carson

Enabling "Change Notification" in AD replication has really improved the EAC/ECP experience.  This allows the DCs to talk much faster at the cost of CPU/Bandwidth.

Thanks for all your help guys!

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc961787.aspx\