RE: Small Fopah
What I have done (might not work depending on your political climate at your job) was send out an e-mail with top 10 biggest mailboxes - these would take the longest to recover if there's a crash. Also, FWIW I *ALWAYS* set mailbox limits, even if they are high - my thinking is if there is some error/spam attack/extreme stupidity there's a chance someone's quota would get hit before the stores dismount. Limits generally high enough so they don't notice, and low enough that it's unlikely any one or two users could fill their mailboxes enough to dismount the store. My $1.25 David Lum // SYSTEMS ENGINEER NORTHWEST EVALUATION ASSOCIATION (Desk) 971.222.1025 // (Cell) 503.267.9764 -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 10:05 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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.% 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
RE: Small Fopah
Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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.% 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
Re: Small Fopah
I have multiple stores with multiple DB's each (2-3). I haven't been able to sell mgmt. on mailbox quotas, however, they do allow me to to mailbox cleanup, deleting anything older than 45 days. It's a pretty good system that keeps the mailbox databases at a relatively stable size. This is, as has been stated, best practice for E2K3. I recently had a chance to put this to the test. I had a single database that would not successfully backup, after reading some info from this list, I made the recommendation to mgmt. of what the best possible scenario for recovery without loss of data was and got the go ahead to do it. I created a new database, and moved the mailboxes from the probable corrupted database to the new one, then dismounted the bad database, and deleted it. It only impacted a small group of people rather than the entire organization, and resolved the issue. I was even able to do it during normal business hours because the only time interuption of service happened was when that persons mailbox was actually being moved, which only took a few minutes each. On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
Re: Small Fopah
Michael, Are those documented somewhere (I believe you - I've always asked for those as something other than a services deliverable, and never got them). --James On 10/9/08, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
Re: Small Fopah
Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michaelhttp://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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.% sure
RE: Small Fopah
I bet *you* have :-) From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
RE: Small Fopah
Easily done: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb331954(EXCHG.80).aspx Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: James Wells [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:54 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Michael, Are those documented somewhere (I believe you - I've always asked for those as something other than a services deliverable, and never got them). --James On 10/9/08, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
RE: Small Fopah
The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was - you guessed - to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
Re: Small Fopah
How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was – you guessed – to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michaelhttp://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange *From:* Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM *To:* MS-Exchange Admin Issues *Subject:* Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michaelhttp://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
RE: Small Fopah
If you really want to do this, the answer to your question depends on whether or not you have DIR, since DIR gets lost during a mailbox move. There's also the white space you can subtract from the total. Suggestions? How about archiving? I think about SIS from time to time, but it's not the driving force for our configuration and I would never reconfigure based on that alone. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 8:27 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.% 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~
RE: Small Fopah
From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? He probably broke into a Happy Dance singing Ka-Ching, Ka-Ching all the way to the bank. Webster On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was - you guessed - to make it manageable. ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Small Fopah
In front of a client I am always the consummate professional. I kept it inside until I got back to the hotel that night. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.) (In general, people paying my rates don't like to be laughed at!) Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:50 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was - you guessed - to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
RE: Small Fopah
In general people paying you don't like to laughed at I've figured this out after years of research. My friends call me Winchester. _ From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 8:06 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah In front of a client I am always the consummate professional. I kept it inside until I got back to the hotel that night. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.) (In general, people paying my rates don't like to be laughed at!) Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:50 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was - you guessed - to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
RE: Small Fopah
More coffee = better grammar. In general people paying you don't like to BE laughed at. Glasses on face may help too. =) _ From: Matt Moore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 8:12 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah In general people paying you don't like to laughed at I've figured this out after years of research. My friends call me Winchester. _ From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 8:06 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah In front of a client I am always the consummate professional. I kept it inside until I got back to the hotel that night. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.) (In general, people paying my rates don't like to be laughed at!) Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:50 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was - you guessed - to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
RE: Small Fopah
From: Matt Moore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Small Fopah More coffee = better grammar. In general people paying you don't like to BE laughed at. Glasses on face may help too. =) Shot glasses or eye glasses? J Webster ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Small Fopah
How did you refrain from hysterics? From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:50 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was - you guessed - to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
Re: Small Fopah
Still laughing because they were warned ahead of time that this was bad mojo... On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Don Ely [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm still laughing... On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 8:56 AM, Maglinger, Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: How did you refrain from hysterics? -- *From:* Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:50 AM *To:* MS-Exchange Admin Issues *Subject:* Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was – you guessed – to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michaelhttp://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange *From:* Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM *To:* MS-Exchange Admin Issues *Subject:* Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michaelhttp://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
RE: Small Fopah
I find, in more and more companies that I go into, that their daily operations are governed by fear. The technicians/administrators/engineers are afraid to make changes - because they don't know what will happen. They are afraid to bring a problem to the eyes of management - because they are afraid that they will get fired. They were brought in after someone else and they don't understand the why of something and they don't ask - because they are afraid they will look stupid. I spend a lot of time going in and calming people down and saying no problem. Or yes you have an issue, but it's easy to fix. That's probably 90%+ of my engagements. The others - well, they can be challenging. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Maglinger, Paul [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:56 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterics? _ From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:50 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was - you guessed - to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
Re: Small Fopah
Agreed... No fear here... They don't accuse me of being deliberate and blunt for nothing around here... :P On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I find, in more and more companies that I go into, that their daily operations are governed by fear. The technicians/administrators/engineers are afraid to make changes – because they don't know what will happen. They are afraid to bring a problem to the eyes of management – because they are afraid that they will get fired. They were brought in after someone else and they don't understand the why of something and they don't ask – because they are afraid they will look stupid. I spend a lot of time going in and calming people down and saying no problem. Or yes you have an issue, but it's easy to fix. That's probably 90%+ of my engagements. The others – well, they can be challenging. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michaelhttp://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange *From:* Maglinger, Paul [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:56 AM *To:* MS-Exchange Admin Issues *Subject:* RE: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterics? -- *From:* Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:50 AM *To:* MS-Exchange Admin Issues *Subject:* Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was – you guessed – to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michaelhttp://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange *From:* Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM *To:* MS-Exchange Admin Issues *Subject:* Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michaelhttp://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
Re: Small Fopah
Agreed!!! =0 - Original Message - From: Don Ely To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:11 AM Subject: Re: Small Fopah Agreed... No fear here... They don't accuse me of being deliberate and blunt for nothing around here... :P On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I find, in more and more companies that I go into, that their daily operations are governed by fear. The technicians/administrators/engineers are afraid to make changes – because they don't know what will happen. They are afraid to bring a problem to the eyes of management – because they are afraid that they will get fired. They were brought in after someone else and they don't understand the why of something and they don't ask – because they are afraid they will look stupid. I spend a lot of time going in and calming people down and saying no problem. Or yes you have an issue, but it's easy to fix. That's probably 90%+ of my engagements. The others – well, they can be challenging. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Maglinger, Paul [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:56 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterics? From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:50 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was – you guessed – to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
Re: Small Fopah
Shot glasses only make me type with reckless abandon. Opinion circuits turned up to 10. I don't need no stinking spell check! - Original Message - From: Webster To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 8:31 AM Subject: RE: Small Fopah From: Matt Moore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Small Fopah More coffee = better grammar. In general people paying you don't like to BE laughed at. Glasses on face may help too. =) Shot glasses or eye glasses? J Webster ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
Re: Small Fopah
The alternative is the engineers say things, report it, ask/beg/plead but because the cause is partially other groups realms, managers dance, duck, weave and avoid letting you do anything until you give up. My favorite was after 3 years and 4 open MS tickets, management blew some of our remaining support stuff to have an engineer flown out to evaluate performance for a week on our Exchange cluster. In researching all the tickets they found mine (the first one) where I had, on the initial call, sent a document outlining my conclusions with data and technical links (management didn't like them) and the FTE on site asked why was he here, his conclusions were the same. We now are going to have dedicated storage for our Exchange. Steven Peck http://www.blkmtn.org On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I find, in more and more companies that I go into, that their daily operations are governed by fear. The technicians/administrators/engineers are afraid to make changes – because they don't know what will happen. They are afraid to bring a problem to the eyes of management – because they are afraid that they will get fired. They were brought in after someone else and they don't understand the why of something and they don't ask – because they are afraid they will look stupid. I spend a lot of time going in and calming people down and saying no problem. Or yes you have an issue, but it's easy to fix. That's probably 90%+ of my engagements. The others – well, they can be challenging. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Maglinger, Paul [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:56 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterics? From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:50 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah How did you refrain from hysterical laughter when you saw the file size? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The largest exchange store I've ever seen was 3.5 TB. It was never backed up. The project was – you guessed – to make it manageable. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange From: Don Ely [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 10:19 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Small Fopah Anyone ever seen a 600GB database? How about 2 of them? On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Microsoft guidance says that if you are doing streaming backups, you should target 35 GB per store as an opti-max value, never exceeding 50 GB. If you are doing VSS backups, never exceed 100 GB. If you are doing continuous replication backups (that is, backing up the passive copy), never exceed 200 GB. These are recommendations, not we won't support you if you exceed these values. The right answer for a given company for the maximum size of a store is: whatever you can backup and restore within your SLA. MSFT recommends that you ignore SIS when planning for the size of your mailbox stores. Regards, Michael B. Smith, MCITP:SA,EMA/MCSE/Exchange MVP My blog: http://TheEssentialExchange.com/blogs/michael Link with me at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/theessentialexchange -Original Message- From: Michelle Weaver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:05 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Small Fopah 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
RE: Small Fopah
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.% 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~
