I have done a lot of Exchange Online Migrations over the years and I would like to share my tips & tricks in moving the mailboxes via Powershell. I am going to discus moving a single mailbox, moving mailboxes in bulk, offboarding mailboxes back to Exchange On-Premises. Furthermore I am going to show you how to collect information in CSV’s so you can move them easier.

Tips & Tricks

Firstly, I want to say that I prefer move requests over migration batches. If you know you way around Powershell this gives you more control and the completion of mailboxes will take less time.

Single mailbox to Exchange Online

Let’s start with migrating a single user to Exchange Online.

#first specify you on-prem credentials
$ONPREMCREDS = Get-Credential

#Then connect to Exchange Online
Connect-ExchangeOnline

#Then move the mailbox to the AutoSuspended state.
New-MoveRequest -Identity "username@domain.com" -Remote -RemoteHostName "Your MRS Proxy Endpint" -TargetDeliveryDomain domainname.mail.onmicrosoft.com -RemoteCredential $ONPREMCREDS -BadItemLimit 1000 -SuspendWhenReadytoComplete

If you get the error that the command “Connect-ExchangeOnline” does not exist please install the MSOnline module with command:

Install-Module MSOnline

This is the command where you get status of the move request:

Get-MoveRequest | Get-MoveRequestStatistics

For example, this is what the status of a move request looks like:

To complete the mailboxes that have the “StatusDetail” of “AutoSuspended”, this is the status where mailbox is synced and is ready to be completed.

We run the following command because we stated earlier that the move-request needs to be “AutoSuspended”

Get-MoveRequest | Where-Object Status -EQ AutoSuspended | Resume-Moverequest

To remove completed move-request please use the following command:

Get-MoveRequest | Where-Object Status -eq completed | Remove-MoveRequest

Single mailbox to On-Premises

Secondly, let’s move a mailbox back on-premises:

$ONPREMCREDS = Get-Credential

Connect-ExchangeOnline

Get-Mailbox -Identity "username@domain.com" | New-MoveRequest -OutBound -RemoteTargetDatabase "Databasename" -RemoteHostName "YOUR MRS Proxy endpoint" -RemoteCredential $ONPREMCREDS -TargetDeliveryDomain "domain.com"

You can use the same commands to check the status of the move request and to remove the move requests.

Bulk mailboxes to Exchange Online

The principle is the same for the single user move-request. The only code that has been added is a CSV import and a foreach loop.

This is code:

#first specify you on-prem credentials
$ONPREMCREDS = Get-Credential

#Then connect to Exchange Online
Connect-ExchangeOnline

#Collect the CSV info
$MAILBOXLIST = Import-CSV "C:\Userlist.csv"

#Create the move requests
foreach ($line in $MAILBOXLIST) {
    New-MoveRequest -Identity $line.alias -Remote -RemoteHostName "Your MRS Proxy Endpoint" -TargetDeliveryDomain domainname.mail.onmicrosoft.com -RemoteCredential $ONPREMCREDS -BadItemLimit 1000 -SuspendWhenReadytoComplete

    Write-Host The moverequest for $line.alias is being created -ForegroundColor Green

    }

For example, this is output when you run this command:

The move request are created 1 at a time, this means you can complete them one at a time or all together if you like.

Bulk mailboxes to On-Premises

This principle is the same for the bulk mailboxes to Exchange Online only the code is a little bit different.

#first specify you on-prem credentials
$ONPREMCREDS = Get-Credential

#Then connect to Exchange Online
Connect-ExchangeOnline

#Collect the CSV info
$MAILBOXLIST = Import-CSV "C:\Userlist.csv"

#Create the move requests
foreach ($line in $MAILBOXLIST) {
    Get-Mailbox -Identity $line.alias | New-MoveRequest -OutBound -RemoteTargetDatabase "Database Name" -RemoteHostName "Your MRS Proxy EndPoint" -RemoteCredential $ONPREMCREDS -TargetDeliveryDomain "domain.com"

    Write-Host The moverequest for $line.alias is being created -ForegroundColor Green

    }

Collect CSV’s

You can easily collect the information needed from the Exchange Admin Center.

Go the mailboxes that you want to migrate and click on the elipsys:

After that choose the option to “Export to CSV”:

Next choose to only export the Emailaddress:

This is the result:

References

Exchange Online Move Commands
Check if users have their mailboxes on-premises

More info about Exchange Online:

Exchange Online Error HCW8108