Hello and thank you in advance for your assistance!

Our server has 4 3.19gh Xeon processors with 3 g of Ram. Three Hdd's C:
=136g with 76.4g free; D: = 409g w/ 26.7g free; E: = 136g w/52.4 free.

We have our main store on D: with the DB size of 288gb!! We also have 2
other storage groups on this drive. the 2nd is 61.5gb the 3rd is 39gb.
We have the logs and working folder on the E:
The C: is basicly for the system.

Among my many questions are:
1. Do you think these out of control databases are the cause of our slow
proformance?
2. What is the best way to free up space on this drive?
   an offline defrag is basicly off the table as it would take 3 or 4 days -
or would it??
3. Seeing the 1st group is so large should I roll the 2nd and 3rd groups
back into the first one and then delete them??
4. Is there a time friendly way to compact these db's?

Thank you again!

Off the top of my head its going to be that your storage system is well
under-configured.
What version Exchange are you using?

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mthomann wrote:
Show quoteHide quoteRAM. RAM. RAM.

3GB is not going to cut it. Double it, minimum. That is most likely why
performance is slow. Not nearly enough RAM to deal with the user load
you are likely seeing.

There isn't a friendly way for Exchange to compact. It is, to my mind,
one of the weaknesses of the product. To compact, the store has to go
offline, and let me tell you how long that 288GB store will take to
compact. For-evah.

Likely better to create a fresh Information Store, then go to a group of
users, have them get their mailboxes under control, and then move their
mailboxes to the new Information Store, lather, rinse, repeat. Might be
a better strategy though others may recommend as I don't know how the
single instance storage will work across stores once you purge out the
old store. And consider using quotas and mailbox manangement to enforce
email policies.

Venger

That would depend on the Exchange version. If its 2003, you never want more
than 4 GB.  Exchange 2007, that’s a whole 'nuther story.
That’s why Im asking on the Exchange version being used.

Martin Blackstone [MVP] wrote:
Show quoteHide quoteIndeed, I assumed... and when you assume...

Venger

Before considering "reigning it in", consider why the store is the size that
it is?

1.  Do you have mailbox size limits in your environment?
2.  What does your deleted items retention look like?
3.  What service levels are required by the business to support it's
objectives?
4.  How are mailboxes distributed across the three storage groups?

Some environments need to retain more mail than others.  That's ok.  If the
business requires you to retain the mail, you want to leave it on the server
or a supported archiving environment so that it stays in managed storage
(gets backed up and can reasonably be considered recoverable.  Same goes for
DIR.  Some organizations need only a few days and others need a few weeks.
In any event, firure out what your requirements are and how those
requirements support business objectives.

Once you do that, do set limits in line with your requirements.  There is no
such thing as an "unlimited" mailbox.  Ultimately, the size of your storage
is a very real limit and you don't want to hit that one.  Look at your
stores and how they are utilized; balancing the users may be in order.
Unless you permanently remove a large amount of mail, it's senseless to do
an offline defrag; it'll cause more harm than anything else.

From the sizes you gave, I'd hazard a guess that you have 144GB hard drives
(when you convert from the base 10 rating of the disk manufacturer to the
base 2 size seen by the OS, a 144 is about 136);  a mirror for the boot
partition, 4 drives in RAID 5 for the databases, and a mirror for the logs.
Since all if the DBs are on one volume, and all the logs on another, from a
performance perspective you don't gain anything by moving stuff between
storage groups.  What leveling will impact is your SLAs and potentially your
backup window depending on how you do backups.

You make no mention of how many users you have, or how large the IO load is
on the disk.  I can say that the RAID 5 in generall is inappropriate for an
Exchange 2003 or 2007 workload.  An Exchange 2003 typical workload has a 2:1
read/write ratio and Exchange 2007 is closer to 1:1.  RAID 5 has a write
penalty of 4.  If the write penalty of your chosen RAID type is higher than
the read/write ratio of your application, then the chosen RAID type is
inappropriate for the application workload.  Although RAID 5 gives you more
space than RAID 10 (409GB vs 272GB), the performance is less than half and
the write performance in particular is lacking thanks to the RAID 5 write
penalty of 4.


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