Folks,
This question is in regards to relocating the Exchange 5.5 Information Store. I have Exchange 5.5 (over NT 4) running on a Compaq Proliant DL380.
Here is the deal. The public and private IS are both running on drive D: which is a hardwareRAID 5 (Compaq SmartArray) with 4 spindles x 18 GB drives, yielding 52 GB of space.
Obviously, that is over 3X what Exchange 5.5 will support, and about 5X what I will need in the foreseeable future. Don?t ask me why I set it up that way. I know Exchange 2000 breaks past 16 GB, but I don?t plan to upgrade anytime in the near future, and even if I do, I will still not need anything close to 52 GB.
Therefore, I would like to get that drive D: down to 3 spindles, for 36 GB of space, which lets me use the fourth drive as a warm spare. However, I would like to do this without completely blowing away and redoing the server.
I am wondering if I can simply do a backup of the contents of D: and then reconfigure the array, removing one spindle. Then, format the drive (still as drive D: ) and then restore the contents of the volume.
Or, should I run the Exchange Optimizer and make it relocate the IS stuff to drive C: or drive E: (mirrored pairs) where the transaction logs, Directory, and other stuff reside. Then I could proceed with reconfiguring the RAID 5 array as above, and when it is complete, use the Optimizer to move the infostore back to D. This would probably take (a lot) longer, but it would be neater, I think.
Would anyone that has experienced a similar scenario be able to comment? Has anyone been successful using one of these methods, or am I screwed and will I have to re-do the whole server from scratch? I have not found anything on TechNet that really speaks to what I want to do, so I am hesitant to undertake this without hearing from some folks who have done something similar.
Any comments or advice are greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Joe
