July 2015 update: This still applies to Exchange 2013 – I’ve not tested it yet with Exchange 2016, though…

I’m back, this time with Exchange stuff. It’s been awhile, mostly due to my company’s IT department having found out what happens when DNS and AD do not get along and everything starts falling back to NTLM authentication, as well as a long Thanksgiving vacation back to the States. However, I’ve begun a project to overhaul our old user provisioning process, and ActiveRoles Server is at the center of it.

User provisioning means email provisioning, and in an Exchange environment, that means Exchange cmdlets.

The PowerShell cmdlets for Exchange 2010 are about 90% awesome. Why not 100%? Little stuff like returning disk space statistics from Get-MailboxDatabase -Status or Get-MailboxStatistics as strings when doing implicit remoting, not the ByteQuantifiedSize type returned when you use Exchange Management Shell on the server itself, or as a simple int.

This is because ByteQuantifiedSize is not a regular .NET type, but a Microsoft.Exchange.Data type, so instead of rendering it as a plain-vanilla int when the Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010 snap-in isn’t loaded, PowerShell renders it as a String. Microsoft wants us to use implicit remoting instead of the snap-in when running remotely. Make up your minds, Exchange team!

Technet forum discussion about this inconsistency: Exchange Server 2010: why string here and int there with EMC?

Example:

Get-MailboxDatabase -Server US1234 -Status `
| Select-Object AvailableNewMailboxSpace `
| Sort-Object -Descending


AvailableNewMailboxSpace
------------------------
94.88 MB (99,483,648 bytes)
1.58 GB (1,696,464,896 bytes)

Wait… 1.58 GB is bigger than 94.88 MB, right? Not if they’re strings.

However, this can be overcome. I’m posting this because all the ways I could find are stuck deep inside rather long scripts. This method is from http://poshcode.org/1902, by Karl Mitschke (see line 120). I chose to leave it as bytes rather than converting to MB or GB, as the destination for this data is a SQL Server table that will immediately be used for the user provisioning project, but might be used for other things in the future.

Our mailbox databases are named for the sites they’re at: for example, one of the ones at the US-Dallas site would be US-Dallas-MD01. The sitename can be extracted with Split(‘-‘).

Get-MailboxDatabase -Status `
| Select-Object @{Name="Sitename"; `
Expression={$_.Name.split('-')[0]+'-'+$_.Name.split('-')[1]}}, `
Name, Server, `
@{Name="Available"; `
Expression={[int]($_.availablenewmailboxspace.split("(")[1].Split()[0])}} `
| Sort-Object -Property @{Expression="Sitename";Descending=$false}, `
@{Expression="Available";Descending=$true}

That finally got me what I was looking for.

Here’s a function for converting those disk space strings to integers – I’ve added it to the script I use to start Exchange implicit remoting sessions from my workstation.

Function Get-IntFromExchangeNumberString {
Param($NumberString)
 [int]($NumberString.split("(")[1].Split()[0])
}

If there is a better and/or more concise way to do any of what I’ve done, feel free to put it in the comments or post a link!