Starting and Stopping Microsoft Exchange Server Services in a Cluster

On both nodes, service entries for clustered Microsoft Exchange Server resources are set to manual. This prevents the automatic startup of services. All services are started in order of dependency by the cluster's resource manager.

Managing services in a clustered Microsoft Exchange Server environment should be performed using only the Cluster Administrator program. Never stop the clustered resources using the Services application in Control Panel, and never stop the services from a command prompt using the net stop service name command. Doing so can cause unpredictable results because the cluster resource manager sees the resource as failed and either restarts the service or fails over the group.

If services must be taken down for maintenance, use the Cluster Administrator program to stop them. It is recommended that you fail over the entire Microsoft Exchange Server cluster group prior to service maintenance.