Running Eseutil on a non-Exchange Server

[nogarap]

Hi,

I'm running Exchange 2003 Ent, SP2, and have inherited an exchange server with a 150GB private information store on a drive with 6 GB free space. Users have deleted lots of mails, and event viewer tells me I've got 36GB of freespace inside the priv1.edb.
I want to defrag by running eseutil, but of course don't have the recommended database size + 10% free space.
MS have a kb article on running eseutil on non-exchange servers (

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244525

), as well as the more general stuff, (eg,

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192185

and

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255035/

)

I've made up a plan for this work, to do this weekend. If anybody has any experience or knowledge of this procedure, I'd be very grateful for any advice tips that may help.
Plan
Friday:
Run daily backup of exchange on EXCHANGE2003BOX(BackupExec 9)
As soon as the backup finishes, dismount store, and stop exchange services.
Copy priv1.edb to location on FILESERVER (approx 400GB free space)
Run eseutil on FILSERVER, as per MS kb article.
When eseutil completes, copy priv1.edb back to EXCHANGE2003BOX.
Start exchange services on EXCHANGE2003 BOX,
Mount private information store on EXCHANGE2003BOX.
Take another backup.

OK, what have I fogotten please?
Many thanks
Gaz

 

[xmsre]

Logs

 

[58sniper]

That's only 24% whitespace. That whitespace will get reused (even more efficiently) before the stores grow.

Is there some other reason why you're itching to defrag? That's a considerable amount of time that the store will be offline. It's often recommended that it's not necessary to defrag until the whitespace exceeds 30%.

Pat Richard
Microsoft Exchange MVP

 

[nogarap]

Thanks for the replies.

xmsre
How are the logs going to effect this? When I remount the store and run the backup at the end, won't the logs just be rolled into the information store?
58sniper
The main driver for this is the 5GB I have free on the drive the drive Exchange is on. I'm worried about running completely out of space.
As mailboxes grow, will exchange be able to use the whitespace without increasing the physical size of priv1.edb?

 

[zbnet]

Exchange databases use all the in-file space (white space) for new email (when mailboxes grow) before they increase the size of the database file on the disk. Just keep your eye on the 1221 event ids in the application event log, these tell you how much white space the db has.

If you're getting short of space, and users are deleteing email and the white space isn't increasing, check the Deleted Item Retention settings - lowering this will increase the speed at which you recover the space the deleted email uses.

 

[58sniper]

Not only will it use the whitespace, it uses that more efficiently than enlarging the store file size.


Pat Richard
Microsoft Exchange MVP

 

[nogarap]

The more I learn, the more I realise how little I know!

58sniper, I think you and zbnet have convinced me that this doesn't actually need to be performed yet. Funny how I had defragging the store wrong for all of these years. Don't think I've ever run eseutil, and I don't mind if I don't for the rest of my life. I remember running edbutil a couple of times. Maybe I didn't need to run it then either! img [

http://www.tipmaster.com/images/bigsmile.gif

]