What are your Exchange server limits/quotas?

[jocadmin]

From executive positions on down to the everyday worker? When I was military we had documentation stating our limits but how is it in the civilian world. I understand certain positions might require more space, but how about some averages?

Thanks all.

 

[dave2korg]

at the company i was at previously user mailboxes were 50mb.

at the current company (only 65 users) mailboxes are unlimited.

David McKissic
A+, Net+, i-net+, CCNA, CNE, CNA
Dell, Compaq, IBM, HP
Alchemy Worldwide, LLC
Network Administrator

 

[skhoury]

We currently have limits set to 300Megs per user (total 50 users).

We also trained all the users on mailbox archiving.

 

[58sniper]

Normal users 50MB
low management 100MB
Middle management 250MB
Top management is usually around 500MB

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[jocadmin]

Thank you all for the numbers. It gives me a point of reference and helps a ton.

I'm at a company with about 60 users and one exec has exceeded 2G which I think is ridiculous but I'm staying flexible.

One thing I need to do is find out exactly what takes place when archiving so I can train my users better as well.

 

[58sniper]

Keep in mind you can't easily exmerge mailboxes bigger than 2GB.

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[skhoury]

58sniper is right - exmerging becomes difficult, they simply havn't updated the tool yet.

Either way, mailbox archiving is pretty much necessary so I would recommend finding a happy medium and training your users on archiving.

 

[jocadmin]

Exmerge is for importing the .pst into the user's mailbox on the server?

 

[skhoury]

Exmerge allows you to export/import directly out of or into the exchange datastore.

Useful for migrations amoung other things.

 

[jocadmin]

Okay, thank you very much.

 

[58sniper]

It's also good for recovery tasks as well.

The problem with using the built in auto-archiving feature is that it removed email from the server to a .pst. And, you're not supposed to use network stored .pst files - Microsoft doesn't support them.

So - if you auto-archive to a .pst file or manually to a Personal Folders .pst file, you run into compliance problems with HIPPA or Sarbanes-Oxley for mail retention (if your business is health related or publicly traded).

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[teqmod]

WE have ours set pretty high because of large attachments we sometimes deal with. We are set to warn at 1.5GB and the limit is 1.8GB

For the most part I have seen an average of companies use around 300mb as a standard.

Archiving is good but you need to remember to archive to somewhere that is backed up in case of failure.

 

[Zelandakh]

Eek - all our senior staff would have no email by now! We've got top 10% of the company over 2GB and some up to 5GB. Makes for a fun time at backup!

 

[skhoury]

See - that I find to be crazy.

Do these top execs REALLY need 5GB of email on hand ALL the time??

It makes our lifes much more difficult...

I'm assuming you're using some sort of SAN architecture?

 

[jocadmin]

Do these top execs REALLY need 5GB of email on hand ALL the time??

They probably don't need half of the crap, but try convincing them of that. I have one of those. He thinks his computer is a limitless filing cabinet.

 

[58sniper]

I tried to tell a client about email retention, and they basically blew me off. Then, they got sued, and I had to go in and do discovery on their email. You should have seen how fast they developed a retention policy.

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[rliebsch]

My users have no limits, though I have treid for year.
Top Level folks are between 2-4GB
Next Group is between 1-2GB
Next Group down 500-1GB

60 users total. 89GB backup, Mailstore and Mailbox level.
Single server. Nice SCSI RAID5. So far so good.

I have 4 storage groups, each group has 4 stores. I try to balance them so each mailstore is about the same size. This will help with recovery/maintenance downtime.

Robert Liebsch
Stone Yamashita Partners

http://www.stoneyamashita.com/

 

[Zelandakh]

Rob - you've got SIXTEEN stores for 60 users? That's like 4 users per store!

I've got 3 storage groups each with a single store at corp. 180 mailboxes, 110GB IS. Store only and a copy of Aelita Recovery Manager to extract brick level from the store backup if required.

 

[ScottCr]

soft limit 40Mb
Hard Limit 45Mb

Some allowances have been made on a case by case basis.

we have about 1094 users on one server and the database is aprrox 34Gb.

http://scottcross.blogspot.com

Windows and NT Admin.

 

[skhoury]

Holy Exchange that is a lot mail.

I mean seriously, has anyone sat down and actually calculated the amount of years worth of email that is taking into account the datastore compression?

Do they really need all that!!

Rob - Im surprise your RAID array is even keeping up with that amount of traffic. I would have imaging separating out the datastores on another server or using a SAN.

Good job lol