Extra Network Name cluster resource causes Exchange issues

Last week I encountered a nice issue on an exchange 2007 SCC configuration at a customer. When opening the Exchange Management Console an error popped up saying:

"Cannot query cluster continuous replication status for a clustered mailbox server that is not local. server is not hosted on this cluster."















Additionally the cluster was not operating as you should expect from a cluster. When trying to take the Exchange resources offline using Powershell, the following error was displayed:

"Cluster Common Failure Exception : The cluster resource group for clustered mailbox server was not found."






And when trying to move the Exchange cluster group:

"Unable to communicate with the Cluster service on node ''. Please make sure the node is up, the Cluster service is running, and connectivity is operational."






The problem arrose when they wanted to do a restore using a RSG. After the restore was done, the store in the RSG wouldn't mount (another side affect).

After some troubleshooting we found out that an extra Network Name cluster resource was added to the Exchange Cluster Group. We had the feeling that this was causing the issue. We simulated the setup in a testlab and were able to reproduce the problems there. When deleting the additional Network Name resource, the problems went away. Just taking it offline doesn't do the trick. So lesson learned: Leave the Exchange cluster group alone!

Wim.