Have an issue with Exchange 2010 maintenance scripts not initializing? Want to manually place an exchange 2010 DAG node into maintenance mode? Here are the quick steps, entered in the exchange management console:
1. Make sure you have a healthy database: ‘Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus *’ (should see ‘Healthy’ somewhere in the output)
2. Move all databases off of the server to be put into maintenance mode: ‘Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase -Server -Confirm:$FALSE’
3. Move the DAG group off of the server: ‘cluster group “Cluster Group” /moveto:
4. Pause the node in the cluster: ‘cluster node /pause
5. Block database auto-reactivation: ‘Set-MailboxServer -Identity -DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy:BLOCKED
6. Suspend individual mailbox database copies: ‘Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus *\ | Suspend-MailboxDatabaseCopy -ActivationOnly:$TRUE
And your set! Your exchange server within the DAG is now in maintenance mode until you run the ‘StopDagServerMaintenance.ps1’ script, get to patching!