On your Exchange 2016 databases you may encounter a situation in which the content index fails. A failed content index will impact Outlook on the web (OWA) users trying to search their mailbox contents, and can also cause database switchover and failover problems for you.
Failed content indexes can be seen in the output of Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus.
[PS] C:\scripts>Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus * | sort name | Select name,status,contentindexstate Name Status ContentIndexState ---- ------ ----------------- DB05\EX2016SRV1 Mounted Healthy DB05\EX2016SRV2 Healthy FailedAndSuspended DB06\EX2016SRV1 Healthy Healthy DB06\EX2016SRV2 Mounted Healthy DB07\EX2016SRV1 Healthy Healthy DB07\EX2016SRV2 Mounted Healthy DB08\EX2016SRV1 Healthy Healthy DB08\EX2016SRV2 Mounted Healthy
For an Exchange 2016 server that is not a member of a database availability group the failed content index can be rebuilt using the following procedure. Note that rebuilding the content index may cause high CPU utilization on the server. If you have any concerns about performance impact you should perform this work at an off-peak time for your customer.
First, stop the search services on the server.
[PS] C:\>Stop-Service MSExchangeFastSearch [PS] C:\>Stop-Service HostControllerService
Next, open Windows Explorer and go to the folder that contains the files for that database. If you aren’t sure where that is located you can query the database attributes.
[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabase DB05 | select EdbFilePath EdbFilePath ----------- E:\DB05\DB05.edb
In that folder (E:\DB05 in this example) there will be a sub-folder with a GUID for the name, which contains the content index files. Delete that GUID folder.
Start the search services on the server again.
[PS] C:\>Start-Service MSExchangeFastSearch [PS] C:\>Start-Service HostControllerService
The content index will be crawling and rebuilding, which will take some time depending on the size of the database.
For an Exchange 2016 server that is a member of a database availability group the content index can be fixed by reseeding it from a healthy copy.
[PS] C:\>Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy DB05\EX2016SRV2 -CatalogOnly -BeginSeed
When the content index has finished rebuilding or reseeding you should see all healthy results again.
[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus * | sort name | Select name,status,contentindexstate Name Status ContentIndexState ---- ------ ----------------- DB05\EX2016SRV1 Mounted Healthy DB05\EX2016SRV2 Healthy Healthy DB06\EX2016SRV1 Healthy Healthy DB06\EX2016SRV2 Mounted Healthy DB07\EX2016SRV1 Healthy Healthy DB07\EX2016SRV2 Mounted Healthy DB08\EX2016SRV1 Healthy Healthy DB08\EX2016SRV2 Mounted Healthy
This article Repairing a Failed Content Index in Exchange Server 2016 is © 2015 ExchangeServerPro.com
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