Every 3 to 6 months we start losing connection to exchange from outlook (i.e Outlook has lost connection to exchange -> Outlook has restored connection to exchange). After this happens the mailbox database inevitably becomes dismounted and won't mount again without me doing something with eseutil to repair it, sort the logs out etc. Sometimes, I need to restore the backup from the night before. In all cases eseutil /mh reports the database to be in a Dirty Shutdown State.
We are small company (20 employees) running SBS 2011 running a variety of windows versions from WinXP to Windows 7 (all running Outlook 2003 - 2010 or Thunderbird with IMAP connection).
Edit: Something else that may be worth noting is that store.exe uses half of the servers memory. I have 16GB in the server and store.exe takes about 9GB with the server running on 90-95% memory usage mostly.
My questions are:
- How do I go about debugging this situation? - This is my main query.
- Would moving to a separate server / exchange instance help (if this can be answered without knowing the cause of the problem)?
- The mailbox is about 20GB, is this too large?
In line with the comments:
It turns out that write caching was enabled on the hard drives. Since turning this off the problems have gone away.
There can be many reason for frequent database corruption:
You can check more Reasons and Solutions of Exchange Database Corruption from here.
For repairing Exchange database, Don't try it your own. Call Microsoft support!