2003 exchange server past 75gb

[staboogie]

I have an exchange server standard edition that is reporting that the db is over the 75gb mark. This causes the db to dismount every other day at 5am. We do not have the option of moving to enterprise to create another database to move the mailboxes. I noticed that the backup has not been run on this machine in a while, another problem in itself. I schedule the backup for tonight and hopefully the retention settings will kick in and bring the db done. I'm sure that it will not be down enough (the db is reporting 80gb) but I want to make it to a holiday weekend if I'm going to have downtime for the eseutil process. Is there any other way that anyone knows of to get the db size down?

 

[58sniper]

What do you expect the eseutil process to do for you? It's not what you think.

Look at mailbox limits. Look at Deleted Item Retention times. Look at Deleted Mailbox Retention times.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.exchangeblogs.com/

 

[staboogie]

I've just taken a look at the properties and the retention settings are checked to not delete anything until a backup is done. So it seems like the items that were supposed to be deleted have never been. The backup is running tonight, so that should take care of these. My question would be after these items are deleted, is this going to bring the database size down or would I need to run the eseutil to do that.

 

[baddos]

The database file size is not what causes exchange to dismount it. The 75gb file size limit is the amount of data inside that database file. Shrinking the file with eseutil will not affect the amount of data inside the file only the file size.

 

[58sniper]

Baddos is correct. eseutil will do nothing for you. Forget about running that.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.exchangeblogs.com/

 

[staboogie]

Thank you all for your posts and help. The issue seems to be that the backup never fully completed and there was a check never to not delete items and mailboxes if the backup did not run. I ran a backup tonight to allow the retention items to be deleted. I am hoping that this is going to shrink the size of the database now after the many mailboxes are deleted.