Ondrej Žilinec – IT Blog

One Exchange 2010 server didn’t mount databases after each reboot. When I looked to Event viewer I saw following events:

The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated with service-specific error %%-2137221213

and also

The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated unexpectedly.

These System events are not really usefull. So I’ve looked into Application events and I saw following event:

Unable to initialize the Information Store service because the clocks on the client and server are skewed.

And now we know what the problem is. When I looked at the time on Exchange server and domain controller time looked the same. Weird. 🙂

After couple minutes of looking into events I found events saying about time synchronization with domain controller. Difference before synchronization was 7 minutes. When I restarted service Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology Service all databases mounted correctly.

Exchange mailbox server is virtual machine (VM) in VMWare. And that was a problem. When VM is starting it gets time from ESX server on which VM is running. And that was a problem. ESX server had bad time set. When mailbox Exchange server was starting it aquired bad time from ESX server. VM begun starting services and also Exchange services. Then mentioned services couldn’t start because of time difference between DC and VM. After couple minutes clock got synchronized from DC, but Exchange services didn’t notice that.

So solutions for these problems:

• synchronize times on ESX and DC from same source
• don’t let VMTool to synchronize time on VM
• to force synchronize time using command: Net time \\DomainController /Set
• by restarting service Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology Service time is also checked and also authentification re-established

This problem was caused probably by forcing Kerberos ticket time difference by default to 5 minutes.