I was contracted to redesign a companies AD Sites and Services Topology - it was never setup correctly and despite being a 500 user organisation with 13 branch sites, they were still running of the "Default-First-Site-Name" which is generated automatically by Active Directory for a new domain.
As part of the new design, I updated the Default-First-Site-Name to a name which reflects their main datacentres then went through the process creating the additional site objects, site links and subnet objects.
After renaming Default-First-Site-Name I also updated the AutodiscoverSiteScope on the Client Access Servers in the Exchange 2013 cluster to reflect the new site name (as required for correct site SCP lookups).
After approximately 30 minutes, the IT Department complained they were no longer able to work on Exchange 2013 servers - all commands in the Exchange Management Shell failed with:
Could not find any available Global Catalog in forest
In order to force Exchange Server to redetect Active Directory Sites and Services topology, a restart of the "Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology" service is required on all Exchange servers. Unfortunately almost every Exchange Service is dependent on this service!
As part of the new design, I updated the Default-First-Site-Name to a name which reflects their main datacentres then went through the process creating the additional site objects, site links and subnet objects.
After renaming Default-First-Site-Name I also updated the AutodiscoverSiteScope on the Client Access Servers in the Exchange 2013 cluster to reflect the new site name (as required for correct site SCP lookups).
After approximately 30 minutes, the IT Department complained they were no longer able to work on Exchange 2013 servers - all commands in the Exchange Management Shell failed with:
Could not find any available Global Catalog in forest
Oh dear!
After a quick investigation, the issue was only isolated to Exchange 2013 management tools and Outlook clients were not affected by the Site Object rename.
As a result, we needed to wait until after business hours where we rebooted every Exchange 2013 server in the cluster.
This resolved the problem.
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