One large store in Exchange 2003 isn't a good thing. I know in Exchange 2000, one giant store worked fine, but in 2003, it changed. We had a gigantic store, 163 GB (or some ridiculous number like that). We never could have recovered it, and it wasn't backing up properly because one backup wouldn't be finished when the next one wanted to start. No matter how we tried to tweak the timing, it never seemed to work. Log files never purged, hard drives filled up, Exchange went offline. It was ugliness all around.
We broke the one store into 4 information stores with several databases in each one, trying to keep the database files smaller than 30 GB. I can't remember where I found that "magic number", very well could have been some random thing I dreamed up, but we didn't have problems with Exchange going offline after that. We had no mailbox quotas and no limit to attachments either. A silly, silly way to run Exchange, but the very importants didn't seem to care much for the finer points of the technology. They just wanted complete freedom. I spent a month moving mailboxes into the other stores, after hours, then ran an offline defrag on the emptied store to get the space back. Every month I'd send notes to people with extremely large mailboxes (more than 500 MB). The subject line read "Piggy mailboxes", and I included instructions for cleaning up mailboxes. It offended many customers, but it also shamed them into cleaning out the garbage. Remember, if the size of the database is 100 GB prior to a big purge effort and the customers delete 50 GB of crap, the size of the database remains 100 GB, but the store still has 50 GB to grow before it will get bigger than the 100 GB it was before the cleanup. An offline defrag is required to get the empty space back, but the store won't grow again until the amount of data grows back to the original size, as if that empty 50 GB of data is just a placeholder, waiting to be filled. Either way, you didn't commit a faux pas. The way you're running it, with the exception of the no quota thing, is considered best practice, not one large store. Michelle Weaver Systems Administrator, Materials Research Institute Penn State University -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed 10/8/2008 8:26 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Small Fopah Oh magic genies of Exchange, (Rubbing furiously) Well I believe about a year ago I made a Exchange Fopah with my Stores. Exch 2003 Sp2, Enterprise The thinking was that data in the main Store is growing quite large and the recovery time with our current backup tape drive would have taken 12 to 14 hours..So Veritas estimated.. verified with a tech on the line..yadda yadda.. Mgmt was not happy with that wanted it to be lower without spending money and wanted the stores broken up by Groups.. Admin Staff, Finance, Sales, etc.. The desire was to be able to recover someone's folder or data more quickly than having to do an entire IS recovery of all mailboxes and just recover the depts. Store data.. So I broke it up knowing that SIS would be lost if Email went across stores.. It was brought up to mgmt but they said the majority of email was dept localized. I didn't think so and did not fight hard enough, but.. Now fast forward a year and we are sitting with 5 stores but oh look they all have grown at about the same rate because they send email to everyone regardless so I now make a copy 5 times for every email and attachment.. Did I mention that they refused to set store limits and mandated 20gig file transfers allowed via SMTP..Oh I lost that one hard... CEO had to be able to send videos to his other buddies and the dept heads as well.. So now the question...I am 99.9999% sure that moving all of the mailboxes back into the same store will result in one store being the size of the sum of all 5 stores combined... Am I right there?? Any suggestions now that they are separated and essentially is just taking up more space... Thanks Greg ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
