Active Directory Site Name

I spent some time setting up Microsoft Exchange 2010 Enterprise today. Following Microsoft documentation, I had to do it the ‘advanced’ (aka custom) way and found myself needing to know my ‘Active Directory Site Name’. I tried all sorts of values while trying to set up a Client Access Array on the domain contoso.com using this command:

New-ClientAccessArray -FQDN ClientArray.contoso.com -Site “Contoso” -Name “clientarray.contoso.com”

I kept getting an error message like this:

Exchange can’t find Active Directory Site Contoso. Make sure it exists.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the value for ‘Your Site’ was.

I Googled and Searched and Searched and Googled.

In the end I did something extraordinary. I logged onto my Active Directory server, and loaded up the ‘Active Directory Users and Computers‘ snap in. Under ‘Domain Controllers‘ it was right in front of me…

Default-First-Site-Name – Not only had I not set a ‘Site Name‘ but I only needed to check the properties of the only domain controller in my forest to find it!