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Defragging Exchange servers

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by aperezalonso

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I have an exchange server with Win NT 4.0 that was originally installed in drive c:\, then the DB was moved to d:\ with the optimizer. Now the DB has 3 GB of space but it?s supposed to have 2.0 GB of free space. I need to defrag the DB at the exchange level and at the OS level but Microsoft doesn?t recommend defragging the NT servers. What should I do?

7 replies

by pherr

I defrag often. On all servers using Diskkeeper 6.0 and it works very well. I have never heard that MS recommends against defraging. You can get an eval copy of Diskeeper 6.0 Server it is fully funtional for 30 days.

by kurt.smith

Problem with the DB of MSX that kept on growing even when you delete lots of messages or mailboxes. What happen is that the deleted items are marked as free, you can check this in your eventviewer of your MSX server, somewhere at night it gives an event with the ammount of free space in your DB.
You can use eseutil (or edbutil depending on version of MSX) to defrag your MSX server.
Problem here is you need Approx 1.5 free space on a Disk.

by curlergirl

Exchange has an online defragger that runs automatically (usually scheduled to run during a specified period of time at night). If you look on your server's Event viewer, look for Event #1221 with source MSExchangeISPriv - this message shows the results of the last defrag of the Exchange private information store. Same for the public info store (MSExchangeISPub). I regularly defrag my customers' Exchange DBs about every 6-8 months. The reason MS says you shouldn't do it is that it is costly in time (can take a few hours if you have a 5-10 GB database) and you have to shut down Exchange completely to do it. I say, I can afford to do this a few times a year if it makes my Exchange DBs more stable. If you have a 3.0GB DB with 2.0GB free space, I'd say you definitely need an offline defrag. This is done using the edbutil (for MSX 5.0 or lower) or eseutil (for MSX 5.5). In order to do an offline defrag, you will need to have at least as much free space on the drive as the size of your database (i.e., if you have a 3.0 gig info store, you need at least 3 gigs of free space on the drive when you do the defrag). If your server is short of free space, you can copy the info store and necessary files to another location and do the defrag there, then copy it back again. Look at MS KB article Q163627 if this is the case. Make sure you have a good backup of Exchange before you attempt this. A bit of "free" advice: if you are running Exchange 5.0, consider upgrading to 5.5 - it seems to do a better job of defragging itself. Hope this helps!

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