I have a situation where the hardware running our Ex2k3 Enterprise server is no longer sufficient. The mail store is about 50GB for less then 30 users. The actual data may only be around 12GB, but it hasn’t had an offline backup done in over 5 years (and my spam filter was out for 3 weeks!!!!). I attempted to do one, but the size of the store stopped me since the Dell 2600 only has specific SCSI connectivity and the drives (transaction and store …. and I accidently erased 7GB of logs a month ago) are full. There are no IDE channels, and not even extra molex power connectors. I tried an add in SATA controller and had to get an old AT p/s to power the drives, but nothing has worked (compression and checking the store), and moving that size of store is too difficult. I spent an entire weekend with the mail route disabled while I tried; so I am no longer interested in attempting that solution (worked 36 hours straight and continued once I slept for a couple of hours).
I have decided to bring up a new server (which is done), and move users and eventually decommission the old server. My problem lies in trying to get this done, and have both machines receive email. I can only get one (the master) to receive email and deliver it to the mailbox. If my user resides on the new (member) it gets stuck in the smtp queue. I have not done any modifications to any exchange setup other than the initial install, which left me with what looks like a functioning exchange deployment. I am not able to cluster these machines, so all I want is mail to be delivered to one server, and have exchange determine on which server the mailbox resides, and to deliver it to them. This way I will have time to work on mailbox’s that do not move easily. There is some corruption on my original store that I am unable to fix right now. Once most of the users are off it, I can try some more fix’s, but it is almost impossible to work on due to HDD restrictitons. Any help would be great.
Original Box: Server 2003 SP1-Exchange Ent SP2
New Box: Server 2003 R2/SP2 – Exchange Ent SP2
Thanks,
Troy
PS: I do not want to simply add the store to larger SATA drives because as I said it has errors, and teh store is so large it isn’t easily managed anymore. It is time to start fresh, enforce mailbox size limits and prep for a 2010 migration.
