Exchange - Slow Shutdown and Reboot on a Domain Controller

KB ID 0000565

Problem

To be fair Microsoft recommend that you DO NOT install Exchange on a domain controller. Not only does it cause quite a performance hit on the server, but because of the way services are stopped on the server at shutdown time, the Exchange services take AGES to stop (In fact they end up timing out).

Quite how this explains SBS (Which is a domain controller with Exchange on it) I’m not really sure, perhaps because it’s limited to 75 users Microsoft think that’s OK? But you will still come across Exchange on Domain controllers. I’ve even seen people promote Exchange servers to be domain controllers to fix replication problems. Also If you are in a test environment having one server is more sensible than two (All my test Exchange boxes are domain controllers to save space).

Solution

You can of course manually stop all the Exchange services every time you want to reboot or shutdown. That’s fine in principle but every time you forget you will have annoyed users asking how long it’s going to be down for.

To save that happening I’ve got a script that puts a shutdown shortcut on your desktop (or in the Quick Launch bar if your running on Windows Server 2003). There’s a different one for each version of Exchange, 2010, 2007, and 2003.