I am Dale Hayter, a Microsoft and VMware certified Technical Consultant.

My blog has been built up over the years from my experience of working on an IT helpdesk and also from being out on-site.

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StartDagServerMaintenance – Failed to suspend the server returned 5

When patching a DAG cluster you can run the Microsoft script StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 from 

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\scripts

This script basically moves the cluster resources of itself, pauses the replication and a few other tasks. However if you run the script from a non-elevated Powershell window you will get the error :-

Call-ClusterEXE: cluster.exe did not succeed, but 5 was not a retry-able error code. Not attempting any other servers. This may be an expected error by the caller. Log-Error : Start-DagServerMaintenance: Failed to suspend the server SERVERNAME from hosting the Primary Active Manager, Returned 5.
Exchange

Close the Exchange PowerShell Window and Launch a new elevated one. The command will now run. However if your running a 2 node DAG then you will need to do it manually. I will be covering how to do this in a later post.