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Mutahir
Asked: 2010-05-18 08:27:06 +0800 CST

Exchange 2007 | Mailbox DB Size 180GB

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I have a Exchange 2007 SP1 server running on Windows 2008

6 HD Drives in a RAID-1 OS, DB, Logs on separate RAID-1 Disks

Size of the Mailbox Database is 183GB and increasing

We only have First Storage Group and Second Storage Group

There is no more space on the server to install new Physical Disks and create a Storage Group

Q - Can I resize the RAID-1 Partition where the DB is ?

Q - Any other suggestions as to how I can decrease the Mailbox DB Size ?

Will be grateful for your suggestions on this.

Kind Regards

windows-server-2008 exchange-2007 exchange raid1

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Good news is that Exchange 2007 SP1 has database portability, meaning you can dismount the databases, move them and remount them with no ill effects other than down time. ( http://support.microsoft.com/?id=555603 )

    Bad news is that your company will have to spend money.

    The biggest challenge for Exchange with large datastores is I/O. You can get huge drives now (like 2TB) but the random I/O of Exchange will quickly swamp most storage. So you need to split your datastore into multiple smaller DS spread out across more disks. Expensive.

    Best solutions is to get another server and dedicate it as a mailbox server only and keep you existing server as a CAS server. Again, expensive.

    I think I would look at getting an add-in SCSI controller and adding a set of external hard drives.

    Another cheaper option (although slower) is to move the datastores off to iSCSI storage made from a box running some free iSCSI software like FreeNAS.

    Whatever you decide, do it before you run out of room!!

    HTH

    Mike

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  2. If you are out of space, it's probably time to run in circles scream and shout. If you have space but its on the "wrong partition" you could set up another information store on a new storage group on the other partition and move some mailboxes there. After you have some breathing room it's time to sit down with management and decide whether to get bigger disks to resize the partition (if that's possible with your raid controller) get another server, or decided to create and enforce some retention policies and quotas.

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  3. thanks for your reply, i have created a plan as follows :

    1 - BESR 2010 - Image the whole server, test baremetal restore on another box and also test virtual conversion to hyper-v (just to be sure).

    2 - Shutdown the exchange box (Arranging a downtime), replace the hard disks for DB partition only (2 disks) with larger capacity

    3 - Create raid on those two disks (RAID-1)

    4 - As I won't be replacing the OS Disks, I will just use BESR to restore the DB to the new raid-1 set (new disks - larger capacity).

    5 - Once the restore is completed, reboot the box

    Do you think that would work ? BESR 2010 flushes the logs but we have circular loggin enabled - it does howerver stamps the exchagne db as backed up and in Clean state.

    What do you recommend.

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