I was able to complete the exhaust by increasing the chunk size and removing the jumbo tag from the problematic chunks.<br> After getting the results from AdamC function, I found out the biggest chunk of that shard was ~148 MB of size.<br> After figuring this one out, the first step is connect to the config database and change the max chunk size:<br> use config db.settings.save( { _id:"chunksize", value: 150 } ) The second step was to clear the **jumbo** flag from the relevant chunks. This can be found in the MongoDB Documentation: [Clear jumbo flag][1] Once the chunks were not longer marked as 'jumbo' the balancer had no problem migrating them to another shard.<br> Once all of this was done, I restored the chunkSize back to 64 db.settings.save( { _id:"chunksize", value: 64 } ) As I do not want that all of my chunks will be as bigger. and when possible, I'll correct the hashed shard key on the problematic collections to create a more divisible shard keys. Thank you AdamC, your initial guidance set me on the correct path to solve this problem. [1]: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/clear-jumbo-flag/