FailedAndSuspended Content Index in Exchange Server 2016

For some reason our domain could not see the mailbox database on our 2016 servers. When running a “Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus,” I received a “FailedAndSuspended” state under “ContentIndexState”

Name                      Status    ContentIndex
State
----                      ------    -----------------
Database01\MailServer01   Mounted   FailedAndSus
pended

*this is not a DAG configuration

The first thing you can try is just deleting the Catalog and not the entire index. this is a pretty easy win, but in my case it didn’t work and I had to go to the next step.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus * | where {$_.ContentIndexState -eq "FailedAndSuspended"} | Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy -CatalogOnly

In my case I had to rebuild the index, but my DB wasn’t that big, so only took about 20 min. It varies on size and CPU. This can utilize quite a bit CPU, so you may want to do this after hours if you are concerned about performance.

1. Launch exchange powershell in Admin mode
2. Stop the search services on the server you are trying to fix the DB on
   • [ps] c:\Stop-Service MSExchangeFastSearch
   • [ps] c:\Stop-Service HostControllerService
3. Open Windows Explorer and browse to the folder that holds your EDB file
   • You can use this command to find where it resides:
     • [ps] c:\Get-MailboxDatabase Database01 | select EdbFilePath
4. In that folder, you should see a sub-folder with a GUID as the name. This contains the index files. Delete the entire folder.
5. Start the services once again
   • [ps] c:\Start-Service MSExchangeFastSearch
   • [ps] c:\Start-Service HostControllerService

At this time if you re-run the “Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus” command, you may see a “failed” state. Re-run it a couple min later to see if it updates to “crawling” status. This means it is rebuilding the index. After the indexes are done, when running the “Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus” command, you should see “healthy”

Name                      Status    ContentIndex
State
----                      ------    -----------------
Database01\MailServer01   Mounted   Healthy