Hi In our environment, we have an Authentication forest (AuthAD) and a messaging resource forest (MessAD). In one of our sites, we are going to have some maintenence carried out to the Data Center, this means we'll need to shut down all servers. This site contains: 3 x AuthAD GC's 3 x MessAD GC's 1 x Exchange 2007 SCC Cluster 2 x Hub Transport Exchange 2007 2 x CAS server Exchange 2007 2 x UNIX DNS AD is used for DNS in MessAD, but AuthAD uses UNIX DNS. My questions: 1. Will the shutdown of AuthAD GC's have any effect on Exchange? 2. Do ALL GC's have to be shut down last, or can some be shut down first as long as there are still some remaining right at the end? 3. In which order should the Mailbox, Hub and CAS servers be shut down / powered up? 4. All when powered on, let's say two MessAD GC's are powered on at the start, they replicate all data from another site, then we power on Exchange. Finally, we power on the last GC. Obviously, this GC is lagging behind in terms of new data, what would happen if Exchange chose that GC as one of it's own? How does Exchange know to connect to the most up to date GC?

I really think you're overthinking this. 1. I suspect not. 2. I would shut down application servers before the DCs, but I think the answer to your question is that you probably only need one domain controller up. 3. I don't think the order is that important, but I would shut down the mailbox servers first. 4. I wouldn't think this is very important. There shouldn't be a whole lot of changes going on while the servers are shut down.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Hi Tom, For your question 1, you do not need to worry about that, because you have two forests, the account forest and the resource forest have no effect with each other when we do some maintenence. If you do some maintenence on the resource forest server, the users in account forest could not use the mailbox. For your question 2, ED gave some good suggestion. For your question 3, maybe mailbox->hub->cas more better For your question 4, you could power on all DC firstly, and then power on the exchange server cas ->hub->mailbox. Per my know, exchange should auto matically detect new DC & GC in-site and out-of-site, this AD topology discovery discovery process runs every 15 minutes and you can see an event in application log 2080 with source MSExchange ADAccess. Regards! Gavin