Drive Space Issues

[kg00se]

I am running Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 on an old NT 4.0 box. the drive partition that the priv.edb and the pub.edb is 2gb. the problem is that the priv.edb is 1.9gb. I ran eseutil against the priv.edb and the pub.edb and it dropped it to 1.88gb. the problem is that this will keep my exchange services running for about a week before they start shutting down again. does anyone know of a better way to compress the priv.edb and pub.edb other then using the eseutil?

thanks

Kevin

 

[zbnet]

There is no other way, and it's not very effective when you're up against the stops, as you've found. The fundamental truth is you can't compress the data, it's a big as it is.

You either need to move some users off this store to another Exchange server, or get more local disk space.

If not, your store will stop and everyone will stop working...

 

[kg00se]

So basically I'm screwed is what you are saying? if I add another drive to the box. how hard is to move those databases to the new drive?

 

[dennisbbb]

You can just run the Optimizer under the Exchange menu and have it direct all priv.edb and pub.edb to this new drive.

 

[kg00se]

one more question on this.
until I get a new hard drive in that box. since I am sure that it will take a while to get seeing how it is such an old server.

what if I where to move the databases to a mapped drive?
would that be a problem for a temprorary solution and will Exchange 5.5 support that?

 

[SteveMCSE]

You definitely do not want to do that, and I think it's not supported. If you were able to get it to work (which I seriously doubt) You would run into huge performance issues. Consider every time an email comes into the server the data will have to go back out of the nic to the server with the priv.edb file. Users who open their mailbox will have to wait a very long time because the request would have to go to the Exchange server, back out the nic to the server with the priv file, back in the Exchange server and back out to the client. Imagine when the user is cleaning their mailbox up or when they are sending out a lot of email or when you have several hundred people (or even tens of people) connecting to the server. And what about when the file server shuts down or the network becomes unavailable. Exchange services will hang and you'd have data loss because transactions are halfway done writing to the database.

All in all, don't do that. It's probably not supported anyway.

Come to think of it, it CAN'T be supported because drives are mapped to a user's profile and Exchange runs as a service. How are you going to map the drives? Maybe I'm wrong though.

I would seriously not do that, besides, with the low cost of server hardware, why don't you just buy a nice new HP DL 380 G4 server and build Windows 2000 and put Exchange 5.5 on it and restore from backup tape? That would be the best route because you'd be getting off that silly ole NT server.

GoodLuck


Steve
Systems Engineer

 

[netometer]

Hi!
There are three ways to move Exchange 5.5 to new hardware. You can see a demonstration of each of the approaches here:

http://www.netometer.net/video/

I would recommend you the first one.

Dean

Dean

http://www.netometer.net/help/helpdesk.html

 

[zbnet]

You can't run a database on a mapped drive.

To create space in the short term (whilst you get extra disks or new server hardware organised) you can ask your users to delete as much email as possible. Make sure they are emptying their Deleted Items folders (a tickbox in Outlook's Options controls whetre the Deleted Items folder is emptied or not when Outlook is exited). Also, if you have Deleted Item Retention set on the priv, you should consider reducing this, possibly to zero.

If you look under mailbox resources, you'll probably find that about 20% of your users account for getting on for 80% of your email database (it might not be as extreme as that, but you get the picture). Targetting your top 20% of space hogs can make a significant difference to your mail storage. Ask them if there is any old email they can archive to a PST (often these top pack rats never delete any email, so they have mail dating back literally years, that they keep 'because they can').

 

[kg00se]

Doesn't exchange 5.5 have a utility that can be run against the users and delete any email that is older then a certain time frame? If I could run something like that then that would help as well. and the hell with the pack rats, that's what they get for not listening in the first place.

thanks

 

[zbnet]

Yes - 2 ways to do this.

Manbox Manager is an add-in that you install and configure. It's very configurable, and schedulable, but a lot of work for a one-off.

For a one-off, use the Clean Mailbox option in Admin - it does the whole mailbox, rather than individual folders like Mailbox Manager, but its much easier to use immediately.

 

[kg00se]

will exchange 5.5 run on a 2003 server?

 

[zbnet]

No.

 

[SteveMCSE]

I strongly recommend against running ANY tool that deletes other people's email. Even if you are an Admin it's not up to you to decide what email gets deleted. Those messages are the users' messages not the Admins. Ultimately they belong to the company. If you run Mailbox Manager it can be very destructive and delete everything from all mailboxes older than a specific date. This happened one time at the Federal Agency that I work for. Fortunately I wasn't working there yet, but I've heard war stories. If you need to delete email that badly, I recommend getting approval from someone higher up to require all users to archive old stuff, then start lowering there send limits on their mailboxes.

Steve
Systems Engineer

 

[kg00se]

thanks guys for all of your help.
since the backup server and the exchabe server run on the same machine. I moved the catalog section of the backup server to run on another drive on that machine.

I now have plenty of room for everything to run.

thanks again for all the help.

Kevin

 

[RichardMoran]

Many years ago I had a problem with disk space on an NT box running Exchange 5.5 which also served as a file server. I had several drives in the server, but none had enough free space to be of any use; perhaps 20MB max on each. I spent several days deleting/moving files to keep the system running, whilst trying to find a possible solution on the Internet.

In the end having failed to find a suitable solution, I stopped the services and enabled NTFS compression on the drive storing the Exchange data files. It worked like a dream; I gained back a considerable amount of free space on the drive. To this day it still puzzles me how such large files could be compressed with so little free space for temp/working files.

On restarting the Exchange services, the performance seemed no slower than before.

To give you a more recent example, I was using Ontrack's PowerControl utilities on a restored PRIV.EDB, but was having some space issues, so I compressed the folder that it was stored in. The PRIV.EDB was 13.8GB, but after compression only took up 10.5GB of disk space; a saving of over 3GB!

I'm not saying that this should be your first course of action, but if you're in a tight spot and everything else has failed, or you're under time constraints, it could just save the day. It could at least give you the time to implement a long term solution.

Rik

 

[zbnet]

NTFS compression is NOT recommended for Exchange data files.

 

[kg00se]

not only is this my exchange server but is also a backup server as well as a pdc. everything that I looked at was how to replace the server with an exact duplicate. this solution doesn't work for me. how ever since I was fighting with less the 20mbs of space left on that drive and fighting on a daily basis with for hard drive space. I moved all the catlalog files for the backup software to another drive and modified all of the registry pointers for the catalog locations and I was able to open up over 300mb of hdd space. I am happy with this for now. also What I have done was make rules for all the email clients that will move all incoming and outgoing mail to a personal folder on their local hard drives. this also helps me maintain the space on the exchange drive as well. and since I can really care less about if they are able to save their mail or not, this is working for me at the moment.

 

[zbnet]

This really tells us a lot about how important email is to your business (ie not a lot).

I imagine your email server will work fine if you move all the email off it! However, that isn't really a solution to your problems - PST files are not very efficient, prone to corruption, insecure, and size-limited. I would imagine that running in this configuration will cause increasing levels of failure and support issues.

If an email is business critical, then it should be on the Exchange server, being regularly backed up, held efficiently and securely, protected against corruption by transaction logfiles, and being error-checked nightly as part of the online exchange-aware backup. If your server isn't big enough to handle all the business-critical email, then your business either needs to buy a bigger, more capable server, or it needs to move some of the roles away from it (as you have already done with the backup software - by the way, I hope the backup files weren't on the same disk volumes as the Exchange databases or transaction log files?). It's never a good idea to share an Exchange server with other infrastructure roles, it just compromises the performance and/or integrity of your email service.

 

[kg00se]

Yes I know it's not good policy to run a server like this wilt multiple roles. unfortunately this is what I walked into when I took the job and replaced the IT Manager that was here with the company from the beginning. this multi app server will be going away soon. the backups are going to stop running on that server in the next couple of weeks since I am getting rid of the dlt backup solution and moving to the rocketvault solution also I am in the process of loading up a new server with Exchange 2000 and going to work on the implementation of that server so the mail and space issue can fall back to working they way it should. so the only role that server will have is just a simple PDC until that all changes with th nt4.0 domain to 2003 migration are complete.