Recently
I was looking at our Exchange 2010 and it was just growing wildly.
I
had to introduce some measures to prevent things from escalating to a red
alert.I checked all mailboxes and which users were the culprit, but it is just the way most businesses use their mail system now a day. It is used for pretty much everything.
I
thought about defragging the databases (we had 5 databases) and this is the
limit for Standard Edition. I though, these databases must be fragmented.
I
had a look at each database size and they were each larger than 100GB. To
defrag a database that size it would take around 8 hours. I can’t have the
server down for 8 hours.
I
could create a new database, but I have used all 5 database limit for the
Standard version.
I
could move all users to a single database, but again this takes a long time, as
each mailbox is over 8GB.
I
had a look at the price to upgrade to Enterprise edition (it supports over 5
Databases), the cost was not prohibitive, and so I bought it.
Now I can create one
database per department, I can move each user to their respective departmental
database, empty the old databases and just delete them.
Once you create a new
database and move few mailboxes, the new database will be smaller and faster,
so no need to defrag and you can simply delete the old database.
Note: Be
careful when moving mailboxes, Exchange 2010 generates a lot of logs, for each
mailbox moved. I would suggest keep an
eye on your disk, the one which hosts the logs.
It is very easy to change
from Exchange Standard to Enterprise. Just run the command below:Command
Set-ExchangeServer -Identity
“your server name” -ProductKey “your Enterprise key”
You will need to restart the information store
service.
Note: I would
recommend doing this out of hours, so the business does not suffer from a
negative impact and downtime.
by Renato de Oliveira
