RE: OT: Good source for Exchange Mailstore Management
- From: "Thomas W Shinder" <tshinder@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "[ISAserver.org Discussion List]" <isalist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:04:59 -0600
I think we'll all agree that you've accrued the appropriate number of
social credits.
Thomas W Shinder, M.D.
Site: www.isaserver.org
Blog: http://blogs.isaserver.org/shinder/
Book: http://tinyurl.com/3xqb7
MVP -- ISA Firewalls
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thor (Hammer of God) [mailto:Thor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 1:59 PM
> To: [ISAserver.org Discussion List]
> Subject: [isalist] RE: OT: Good source for Exchange Mailstore
> Management
>
> http://www.ISAserver.org
>
>
>
> Wow! Thanks so much for the info!! I'll forward this on to my
> admin. I really appreciate you taking the time for me. And my
> apologies to the list for the OT post- I know most of this is
> available via research and such, but for me, getting the info from
> trusted colleagues is far more valuable for me. Thanks for putting
> up with me ;)
>
> t
>
>
> On Mar 14, 2006, at 11:53 AM, Young, Gerald G wrote:
>
> > http://www.ISAserver.org
> >
> > You're going to want to check the integrity of your database file
> > using
> > the eseutil /k command. Unfortunately, that means you'll need to
> > dismount the store. Did your Exchange server crash
> sometime recently?
> > Or was it just after the issue you were having with the disk in the
> > shared storage that you started having problems?
> >
> > Since you got to take down the store to check the database
> integrity,
> > you might want to go ahead and perform an offline backup,
> too. Check
> > out KB Article 237767 (XADM: Understanding Offline and Snapshot
> > Backups)
> > for additional information on how to do so. Be sure to
> grab a copy of
> > all log files between the last time you took a successful backup
> > and now
> > to be sure you can reply them against the offline backup, if
> > necessary.
> >
> > So, if you're not able to take a backup, what's your log file free
> > disk
> > space looking like? My guess would be that it's filling up.
> > Dismounting the store should commit any data in the log files to the
> > database. You can confirm this by running the eseutil /mh command
> > against your database file once you stop the store. The state
> > should be
> > listed as Clean Shutdown.
> >
> > 90GB database file in and of itself isn't necessarily
> problematic. It
> > is, however, unwieldy. We're running off of a fibre SAN with fibre
> > drives in our environment. Even so, backup and restore takes a long
> > time. It's probably in your best interest to separate your
> users, if
> > only to decrease the total size of a single database.
> While this may
> > increase the complexity of your Exchange and disk
> configuration, it
> > will
> > help minimize the issues that can occur when you do have
> large stores.
> >
> > For backup, restore, and archival (I realize you're already using a
> > solution but I figured I'd throw this out anyway since it
> addresses
> > all
> > functionality), take a look at the NearPoint solution from Mimosa
> > Systems (www.mimosasystems.com). It uses a pretty slick
> architecture
> > that enables pretty much near realtime restoration of Exchange data
> > right down to the individual mail message level. It does this by
> > copying your production database from your Exchange server to
> > itself and
> > then through log shipping (both periodic [you set the period between
> > shipments] and dynamic [each time a log file is created, it's
> > copied to
> > the NearPoint server]), it replays those log files directly
> against
> > its
> > copy of your Exchange database. It also has a zero
> footprint on both
> > your Exchange servers and clients (no agents).
> >
> > If you have more questions about any of this, feel free to ping me
> > offlist. :)
> >
> > Cordially yours,
> > Jerry G. Young II
> > MCSE (4.0/W2K)
> > Atlanta EES Implementation Team Lead
> > HHS Engineering
> > Unisys
> >
> > 11493 Sunset Hills Rd.
> > Reston, VA 20190
> > Office: 703-579-2727
> > Cell: 703-625-1468
> >
> > THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE
> > PROPRIETARY
> > MATERIAL and is thus for use only by the intended recipient. If you
> > received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the e-
> > mail
> > and its attachments from all computers.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Thor (Hammer of God) [mailto:Thor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> > Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 6:08 PM
> > To: [ISAserver.org Discussion List]
> > Subject: [isalist] RE: OT: Good source for Exchange Mailstore
> > Management
> >
> > http://www.ISAserver.org
> >
> > Hi Gerald - thanks for the response (and to everyone else, as well.)
> >
> > Inline (easier)
> >
> > On Mar 13, 2006, at 12:39 PM, Young, Gerald G wrote:
> >
> >> http://www.ISAserver.org
> >>
> >> Thor,
> >>
> >> I help support an Exchange 2003 environment where we have about 16
> >> mailbox stores, each about 100GB in size. What specific kind of
> >> mailbox
> >> store management are you asking about? Archival, backup/restore,
> >> policy
> >> enforcement?
> >
> > My backup is now saying that my message store file is corrupt, but
> > everything is working OK now from an access standpoint (see below
> > for story)
> >
> >
> >>
> >> How many mailboxes make up that 90 GB? Are you on SCSI, ATA,
> >> SATA, or
> >> SAN storage? How big are you looking to grow? Do you have any
> >> compliance (FISMA, HIPAA, FDA, SEC) policies you need to
> follow with
> >> regards to retention?
> >
> > About 65 mailboxes. My users are crazy "CYA" people, and keep every
> > email they've ever gotten forever. I guess that's OK as long as
> > mailbox size/backups don't become an issue.
> > The disk subsystem is a PowerVault 220s with a RAID5 SCSI array.
> > It's the shared storage for my current Dell 2650 cluster servers.
> > I'm moving to the HP DL380 G4 Cluster Servers with the MSA500 G2
> > subsystem, but that won't be for a few weeks. From a hardware
> > standpoint, I think we're good to go. No retention policy issues -
> > even if there were, I've got GFI MailArchiver on a separate system
> > logging all email to a SQL box.
> >
> > But I've had different people tell me different things about
> > splitting up my mailstores, defragging them regularly, etc.
> >
> > Is 90 gig in itself problematic? We recently had a drive go bad in
> > the array, and we had to rebuild it. However, there was an issue
> > with the rebuild - during this time, I wanted to get a copy of my
> > mailstore either on disk, or on tape. But it wouldn't copy
> (CRC) and
> > it wouldn't back up. Seemed like some data errors on another drive
> > kept the array from rebuilding. I was able to manually fix
> the drive
> > with issues, and then the array rebuilt. I then rebuilt it again
> > with a new drive instead of the "problem" drive. (Note one drive
> > completely failed, and one had a data error.)
> >
> > Even after all of that, though everything seems to be working fine,
> > the backup of the file still fails with a "corrupt file" error.
> >
> > I'm wondering now if I should break up my users into different mail-
> > stores to make them more manageable, etc. Any advise?
> >
> > t
> >
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