Cluster hotfix for Exchange 2000

  • Article

KB article came out the other day on this sort of obscure scenario, but interesting to know about in any case: KB.896617: “The Exchange Information Store service stops responding when the Exchange Information Store service is shutting down or the Exchange Cluster server is performing a failover process”.

Couple of things to note:

  • This only affects Exchange 2000 (it’s an Exchange 2000 post-SP3 hotfix)
  • … which means it does NOT happen on Exchange 2003.
  • It doesn’t STRICTLY affect clusters, but it’s probably most common there due to the way failover works

As with any hotfix, determine whether you need to apply it before doing so and don’t bother to apply it if you don’t need it. You’ll probably know if you’re hitting this problem on your server.