http://www.ISAserver.org
Gerald, I just wanted to add my $.02 that your responses to the
NON-ISA questions posted to this list are GOLD!! I don't think
there is one that hasn't been useful to me, even though I didn't
ask the question. Thanks for your valuable time and thorough and
understandable information.
Thank you,
Scott Talley
IT Manager, The Combined Group
e> stalley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
p> 469.892.9829
f> 469.892.9710
-----Original Message-----
From: Young, Gerald G [mailto:Gerald.Young@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 1:54 PM
To: [ISAserver.org Discussion List]
Subject: [isalist] RE: OT: Good source for Exchange Mailstore
Management
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
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-----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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