The operation couldn’t be completed because a change occurred in the remote forest

 

By Joseph Piggee Sr.

Many tech ask me about this problem, and whenever I go into a new environment I get the error myself, so I decided to put this little reminder out. If you run into an error when opening the Exchange Management Console (EMC initialization failed and “the operation couldn’t be completed because a change occurred in the remote forest”.

You may also find that while EMC does not work, you are able to launch the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) without any issues.

This may occur when the server you are connecting to has been updated with a Service Pack or Roll Up Update (RU).

Now, there is a possibility that this error may not always indicate a version mismatch between the tools on the client and the RU level of the server, so how can you confirm this is actually the issue? As shown in this Exchange Team blog post, you can confirm the versions do not match by running the following command on both the client and the server from the shell:

Get-Command EXSetup | %{$_.FileVersionInfo}

Here’s the result from the above command on a Windows 7 box running the Exchange 2010 SP1 Management Tools:

This command is checking the file version information for the local instance of ExSetup.exe on both the client and the server installed by default in C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\bin\

.

Once you get the version numbers you can compare it, using the the following link:

Exchange Server and Update Rollups Builds Numbers

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/exchange-server-and-update-rollups-builds-numbers.aspx

After confirming the version numbers, you know that you’ll need to update the tools on my client machine and install RU2 or other related Roll-up to resolve the issue. At the time of this posting the current Rollup is 8.