Repairing ContentIndexState on DAG Nodes in Exchange 2013

In Exchange Server 2013, sometimes the content index state can go corrupt on databases.  When this occurs, Exchange 2013 FAST search technology is no longer available for the database meaning people cannot search for content from OWA, Active Sync or Outlook in online mode.

In DAG environments, you can simply reseed the Content Index State from a healthy node in the cluster.  I will show you how to perform this in this blog post.

Here we have two databases in a DAG cluster which have the index status in a failed state:

To manually update the ContentIndexState from a healthy node simply run the following command:

Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy "database\server" -CatalogOnly

In my case the database I want to update was "CCEX2-DB-02" on server "CCEX1" so I ran:

Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy "CCEX2-DB-02\CCEX1" -CatalogOnly

After running the command you can see we brought the index for the database back to a healthy state.

Repeat this process for any other databases with a failed content index.