Determining Exchange’s Database Size

An easy way to determine the Exchange’s actual database size is to look for Event ID 1221 under Windows application logs.  For example, If the database size is 100gigs and event 1221 is reporting 30000 megabytes free space; then your actual database size is 70gigs.  As a result, you can compact the database to 70gigs from 100gigs if you ran an offline defragmentation on the database.

Exchange 2003 Store Out of Disk Space

It’s never good when you corporate Exchange 2003 mailbox store is running or ran out of disk space.  This would lead to a possible email outage.  And in today’s market; an email outage can hurt your company financially.  What’s the solution?  Well, there are several possible solution and these are the ones I’ve used in the pass.  (These are based on Exchange Enterprise editions.)  Part 1.

1. The fastest solution in my experience is to move all the users to another store that is not affected by the disk issue.  The store can be physically disk on the same hardware but with different drives or an Exchange store located at a different location (state, country, or galaxy).  Follow the steps below to move users to a different location:

• Right-click on the employee(s) using ADUC and click on Exchange Task.  (This can also be done using Exchange System Manager)

  

• Click Next on the Welcome screen, then click on “Move Mailbox” followed by Next.

  

• This screen will display the current Mailbox Store and gives the option on moving the employee(s) to a new store.  Choose the new server and store using the drop-down lists follow by Next.

 

• Choose how to the way you would like Exchange to handle corrupted mail.  I usually leave the default and choose Next.
• The Task Schedule window allows you to schedule when you the employee(s) mailbox will be moved.  This gives you the option of moving the mailbox during off hours.  But in this case we will choose current date and time followed by Next.
• This will start the process and depending on the mailbox size it can take several seconds to server minutes.

 

• That’s all!  The last screen shows you a summary of the Success or Warnings.  Just keep in mind that it’s possible to move a large number of users at once.  It took me 3 hours to move 150 users with about 100 to 200 Megs average per user.  This will vary depending location, link, mailbox size, amount of mailboxes, etc.

This has always been the fastest answer for me.  It then gives you options on reducing the size of the mailbox store, or creating a new store with new disk and moving the users here during off hours.  An offline defragmentation using the eseutil.exe can be done which will reduce the store size.  I’ll post the how to on part 2.