Greetings,
We were notified today that one of our databases in an Exchange 2013 cluster is currently in a failed state. We have three servers - two at the primary site and one in the DR site. The database has a mounted and healthy copy on its preferred server, but the secondary copy is now failed with a pretty high CopyQueueLength.
I've done plenty of reseeds with Exchange 2010, and I understand that Exchange 2013 will do an automatic reseed in the event of a failure. However the auto-reseed is generating the following message:
Automatic Reseed Manager failed to execute repair workflow 'FailedSuspendedCopyAutoReseed' for database 'DB05'. Error: The Automatic Reseed Manager encountered an error: The automatic repair operation for database copy 'DB05\mb02' will not be run because one of the prerequisite checks failed. Error: There are no Exchange volumes mounted under root path 'C:\ExchangeVolumes', which are required for the Automatic Reseed component.
WorkflowLaunchReason: The seeding operation failed. Error: An error occurred while performing the seed operation. Error: The process cannot access the file 'M:\DB05\DB05.EDB' because it is being used by another process.
During the course of my investigation, I tried to rename the .edb file to .old and was told that the file is in use by Microsoft.exchange.store.worker.exe. There doesn't seem to be a way to kill this process, as every time I've tried I've been told that access is denied. I'm not even sure it's wise to kill the process anyway (I'm only trying to kill the one with the PID that matches the database).
Attempting to manually reseed the database generates a similar error to the one above. I've failed all the databases over to the other server and restarted the Information Store service as well as the Host Controller service, but so far I can't seem to get this file unlocked. One article I found did mention making sure that Exchange Servers is listed and given Read access to the folder. I did manually set this but I still see no change. I also verified that Symantec Endpoint Protection is set to exclude .edb files, and the automatic Exchange exclusions are preventing it from scanning the Exchange install locations.
I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions that I might have missed so far. This is confusing the daylights out of me and I'd like to be able to get this reseeded. I suspect that even a full server restart won't clear this up, so any help would be great. We're just starting to transition users over from Exchange 2007 to 2013, and I'd prefer to have a method of avoiding this in the future before we're in full production.