In a very interesting situation that I came through I had an environment with two DCs and Exchange 2010 that I had previously setup for Hybrid integration with Office 365 for demonstration with a trial subscription but I haven’t removed the integration after I finished my test and the trial expired and the tenant was deleted.

Next I intended to upgrade my existing Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 and setup coexistence between them however, I have stumbled in the step of preparation of AD schema for Exchange 2013. While trying to prepare the schema I got the following error

Setup /PrepareSchema /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms

Welcome to Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 8 Unattended Setup

Copying Files…

File copy complete. Setup will now collect additional information needed for

installation.

Performing Microsoft Exchange Server Prerequisite Check

Prerequisite Analysis FAILED

A hybrid deployment with Office 365 has been detected. Please ensure that you are running setup with the /TenantOrganizationConfig switch. To use the TenantOrganizationConfig switch you must first connect to your Exchange Online tenant via PowerShell and execute the following command: “Get-OrganizationConfig | Export-Clixml -Path MyTenantOrganizationConfig.XML”. Once the XML file has been generated, run setup with the TenantOrganizationConfig switch as follows “/TenantOrganizationConfig MyTenantOrganizationConfig.XML”.

If you continue to see this this message then it indicates that either the XML file specified is corrupt, or you are attempting to upgrade your on-premises Exchange installation to a build that isn’t compatible with the Exchange version of your Office 365 tenant. Your Office 365 tenant must be upgraded to a compatible version of Exchange before upgrading your on-premises Exchange installation. For

more information, see: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=262888

For more information, visit: http://technet.microsoft.com/library(EXCHG.150

)/ms.exch.setupreadiness.DidTenantSettingCreatedAnException.aspx The Exchange Server setup operation didn’t complete. More details can be found in ExchangeSetup.log located in the <SystemDrive>:\ExchangeSetupLogs folder.

The Office 365 Hybrid setup was still there in my Exchange Console and since I couldn’t follow MS’s recommended steps to connect to O365 tenant and get the XML file then I had to do things manually.

First I connected to the EMC and removed all the instances that were created during the Exchange Hybrid Wizard Configuration

1- Removing Organization Relationships

2- Removing Federation Trust

3- Removing Remote Domains

4- Removing Accepted Domains

5- Removing Send and Receive Connectors

6- Lastly the Hybrid Configuration object…

Since remove-hybridconfiguration cmdlet is not supported to remove the hybrid configuration object from AD then we have no choice but to use ADSIEDIT tool to do so.

I will navigate to Configuration > Services > Microsoft Exchange > First Organization > Delete “CN=Hybrid Configuration”

Restart MSExchangeServicehost

Now I will try again to prepare AD schema for Exchange 2013 but I got a different error

Extending Active Directory schema FAILED

The following error was generated when “$error.Clear);

install-ExchangeSchema -LdapFileName ($roleInstallPath + “Setup\Data\”+$

RoleSchemaPrefix + “schema0.ldf”)” was run: “Microsoft.Exchange.Configuration.Tasks.TaskException: There was an error while running ‘ldifde.exe’ to import the schema file ‘C:\Windows\Temp\ExchangeSetup\Setup\Data\PostExchange2003_schema0.ldf’. The error code is: 8224. More details can be found in the error file: ‘C:\Users\Administrator.DEMOTESAS\AppData\Local\Temp\2\ldif.err’at Microsoft.Exchange.Configuration.Tasks.Task.ThrowError(Exception exception, ErrorCategory errorCategory, Object target, String helpUrl)at Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Deployment.InstallExchangeSchema.ImportSchem

aFile(String schemaMasterServer, String schemaFilePath, String macroName, StringmacroValue, WriteVerboseDelegate writeVerbose)at Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Deployment.InstallExchangeSchema.InternalPro

cessRecord()at Microsoft.Exchange.Configuration.Tasks.Task.<ProcessRecord>b__b()at Microsoft.Exchange.Configuration.Tasks.Task.InvokeRetryableFunc(String funcName, Action func, Boolean terminatePipelineIfFailed)”.The Exchange Server setup operation didn’t complete. More details can be found

in ExchangeSetup.log located in the <SystemDrive>:\ExchangeSetupLogs folder.

Checking the ldif.err file mentioned in the error above it seems that Exchange is complaining because the changes of the AD schema is not being replicated to the other AD partners which is true since I have another additional DC that’s turned off.

After turning on the other DC we’ll see what happens

The other DC had another issue as I have turned it off for long time and it was not syncing due to expired Tomb stone life so I had to fix this issue as well and I have published it in a different article.

Please click here to see how the replication issue was fixed.

Issue has been fixed

Hope someone finds this useful