I'm working on an Exchange 2013 CU6 installation at a site whose AD was comprised of two Windows 2003 domain controllers (in an odd HA cluster configuration).
New Windows 2012 R2 DCs have been added, and the necessary roles migrated. The 2003 systems have not been demoted yet, so the Forest/Domain functional level is still 2003.
My issue is that the the Exchange 2013 installer process fails with:
Setup encountered a problem while validating the state of Active
Directory: Couldn't find the Enterprise Organization container.
The error links to a Microsoft article that isn't quite relevant to the situation. This environment never had an Exchange server, so there aren't any artifacts left over from previous installations/attempts.
A look at ADSIEdit confirms this.
The full setup log entries are as follows:
10/16/2014 20:27:36.0204 Failed [Rule:AdInitErrorRule]
[Message:Setup encountered a problem while validating the state of
Active Directory: Couldn't find the Enterprise Organization container.
See the Exchange setup log for more information on this error.]10/16/2014 20:27:36.0204 [REQUIRED] Setup encountered a problem
while validating the state of Active Directory: Couldn't find the
Enterprise Organization container. See the Exchange setup log for
more information on this error.
DC replication appears healthy, DNS and AD Sites and Services are configured properly. None of the usual Exchange Setup switches work (/prepareSchema, /prepareAD). Everything fails with the same error.
Any thoughts on how to proceed?
Best Answer
A suppose the answer here was a bit of voodoo...
Some sick combination of trawling German-language Microsoft forums, digging through errors and Googling/Binging/Altavista-ing... produced:
Given that cocktail of steps, the issue seems to be resolved...