Xadean's Empirical Musing

During a maintenance window, I noticed that the content index state on all the mailbox databases was showing as "failed" or "failedandsuspended". Here is the command to run to check the status:

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus * | where {$_.ContentIndexState -eq "failed"}

Resolution:

• Stop the Microsoft Exchange Search and Microsoft Exchange Search Host Controller services.
• Browse to the directory where the mailbox database .edb file is stored.
• Delete the catalog directory, which will be named something like "AE1F9DD3-D84F-406E-A433-21C4BC05F34912.2.Single".
• Restart the Microsoft Exchange Search and Microsoft Exchange Search Host Controller services.
• Check status with the aforementioned command and it should be showing "Healthy" now (may take a while and shows "unknown" in the interim).