Move Mailbox Help

[striperstalker]

Background: I need to split up a 90 GB info store in order to run eseutil on it. There's only 40 gb free on this box and I don't want to do the defrag over the wire. So I am trying to break up this gihugic info store into 2 pieces so I can run the defrag locally.

Problem: this box is slow as hell, it's a 2000 standard box so virtual memory fragmentation is a problem. The online maintenance hasn't been able to complete in over a year. I need to move about 100 people and 30Gb or so to be able to run the defrag. I've been using the AD Move Mailbox tool and it is killing me.

Help Me: Is there a way to move mailboxes to a new info store on the same Exhange server in some sort of batch mode? The move mailbox tool in 2000 is not a multi threaded process and thus each individual mailbox has to be moved separately. Of course these moves have to happen at night so I am turning into a vampire. Please help.

 

[nhidalgo]

You could try using exmerge to move the mailboxes, but i think using the move mailbox tool in AD is the safer way to do it.

Nick

 

[achaddy]

Don't know about moving mailboxes in batch mode but I can see a problem with your plan to split your 90Gb info store into 2 and defregging with only 40Gb free space.

Firstly, when you split your info store you will loose single instance storage for all mailboxes moved into your new store. This will increase your overall size of the mail storage.
Secondly, Your original info store will not reduce in size when you move half the mailboxes out until you run esutil defrag(offline) on your 90Gb store. Remember the over night defrag which exchange runs by default only frees up white space. It does not compress the store. You need to run esutil to reduce the store by the 30 Gb you are looking to move out. And finally you need 110% space of the store you are trying to defrag.
So even after moving 30Gigs worth of mailboxes out of your original store you still need find 100Gb to compress it.
It might me worth considering a removable USB hard drive to carry out this operation. A 200Gb one would do nicely and don't cost the earth these days. This would also save you the pain of having to move all those mailboxes as well.
Hope this has given you some info to consider to help in your task.