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Exchange 2007 Mailbox Store Question

M

Morphius143

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 30, 2004
Messages
72
Hello all Exchange 2007 admins.

I have searched all over the net looking for a kind of best practise guide but found nothing so thought I would ask here.

We are upgrading to Exchange 2007 Enterprise from 2003 next week and are looking at redesigning the Mailbox Store setup.

Currently we have 2 Mailbox stores one totaling 106GB and one totaling 50GB. Due to working with large files currently people have unrestricted email account limits and a couple are currently storing 20GB in their accounts (housekeeping is on my list of new procedures for them but has to be approached gently as I am the new sysadmin with this mess).

We have three offices so it seemed to make sense move to three storage groups, one for each office then just divide the Mailbox stores into approx 20-30gb groups of accounts (will mean at least one person having their own mailbox store).

We currently have approx 90users in total with approximately 60% with mailboxes under 2GB the rest range between 2GB and 20GB...

Do you think this is the way forward leading to better management?

If not how would you look to arrange this? (and no forcing deletion of old emails is not a valid option (we are getting the Symantec Enterprise vault to seamlessly steal all their old emails away but this will only have limited benefit initially))
 
Let me just say that KVS is just evil. Careful with that :) Then again, we had it with PGP Universal Server.

You could do that, have three storage groups, one for each office; that's what we did.
 
Hey Blitz,

Care to elaborate? Just curious, we run the same setup and don't have any issues (KVS and PGP U). And hearing you call it KVS makes me think you were one of the early adopters (as were we).

As far as to the OP question. Segmenting your storage groups into different offices may be okay for you to manage them logically, but makes very little difference otherwise. The only reason i could think of anyone doing that (outside of convenience) is if you have different policies, archive requirements, performance requirements, and backup requirements for each of those offices.

Lastly, it can't be good to have one user with a 20GB mailbox. How do they keep a local copy of that mailbox?
 
The 20GB mailboxes generally are not in cache mode, but we also have a lot of public folders with remote offices in cache mode and their localaly stored mailbox is extending beyond 20-30GB as they are caching public folders also! We have also had to up the limit on the local stored mailbox as that is set to 20GB by default. We REALLY need to get people archiving and an ftp site set up so that we dont have large attachments being bounced by email all the time!

The other question that I cant seem to get an answer to is... If we had three storage groups with multiple mailbox stores inside so that each store doesnt go over 20GB initially (allowing for doubling in size) How would public folders work?

Would each storage group have its own set or would the single public folder tree appear to all users regardless of which storage group they are in?
 
I just put the public folder database in its own storage group by itself. Makes management a bit easier, IMO.

As for the rest of your mess. Typically Storage Groups are created so you can have different policies, etc applied to them. You could setup a storage group for each office and then create different mailbox databases for groups of users if you want to break up the size of your databases.

Also, if you are going to do a CCR mailbox cluster, you can only have one mailbox database per storage group.
 
If we ever see anyone with a mailbox more than a few GB, we force them to export old things to a PST and to a disk or thumb drive. Kinda defeats the point of having Enterprise Vault, but that's what the whining Exhange admins want because they didn't implement Enterprise Vault right and therefore not a lot of storage is available. lol

As for storage groups, that's why we implemented that - different offices had different requirements for policies, especially since they were different organizations altogether.

As for KVS/PGP, it was more of a client-side quirk than anything else, I just didn't like their Outlook add-in. But it was PGP I disliked more :) We had the clients pushed out via GP, and once the PC rebooted for PGP, they had to the enrollment which failed half of the time because of how THAT was implemented.

We had retarded wintel admins when these products were implemented and I will eventually solve this problem and make it right.
 
Thanks for that Captain C..... The tip about CCR is particularly important as although we are not using that, i think we will be using SCR (we have two servers but no SAN to host the database and didnt want the single point of failure having the databases on the SAN would have caused... this is also being installed by our consultants so I hope they know the score, I just want to know myself.

Given the database size reccomendations of MS of it being 50GB in size (also for faster restores when people hit the magic button) I guess we will have to have mutiple Storage Groups for each office... as long as that wont cause problems other than looking a mess that is fine!

And at the moment we dont have different policies for each office, but it is a possability for the future, they arnt used to having someone with time to devote to improving the systems so anything is possible now!

And thanks for the warning Blitz... we have got some disk space on our SQL server, but do have the capability to expand it as if we need to. although with a 3year retention period we are only going to cute 30-40GB out of a 200GB mailbox total. Also we have been told that KVS has to run on a SQL server, we cant store the databases on a remote pc right???
 
If memory serves I don't think you can have any role besides mailbox server on an SCR or CCR cluster. That would mean you would need a separate box for the Hub Transport and Client Access Server roles. . . . I am hoping your consultants are taking that into consideration. :D
 
Hehe, they are being paid enough to, they implimented our current 2003 system so if they made a mistake, it will be them paying for another 2008 server.... :-D

Perk of having an agreed cost for a complete solution, if it doesnt work, it isnt our problem.

After this I have a VPN project, FTP project (thinking just give selected customers vpn access with restricted accounts, but that is a way off yet) along with ditching the novell file structure of "wpdocs, wpsheets" etc etc...

Not sure i was aware of what i let myself in for!
 
Morphius143 said:
And thanks for the warning Blitz... we have got some disk space on our SQL server, but do have the capability to expand it as if we need to. although with a 3year retention period we are only going to cute 30-40GB out of a 200GB mailbox total. Also we have been told that KVS has to run on a SQL server, we cant store the databases on a remote pc right???
Click to expand...

You can (and should) use an external SQL database/server. Just something else to keep in mind, you can't use Exchange System Manager on a server running Enterprise Vault, has to do with the MAPI32.dll EV installs. Yeah, KVS is what it was originally called before Symantec took it over.
 
Blitzrommel said:
You can (and should) use an external SQL database/server. Just something else to keep in mind, you can't use Exchange System Manager on a server running Enterprise Vault, has to do with the MAPI32.dll EV installs. Yeah, KVS is what it was originally called before Symantec took it over.
Click to expand...

There is a fix for ESM + EV if you are running office 2003. There is no fix currently for Office 2007. Microsoft doesn't even support ESM and outlook on the same machine so don't expect too much fron Symantec on that.

Our EV impliementation is just kicking off and will include 14 servers just for EV., You can have every role borken down to run on seperate servers. Our SQL server is a quad 2.4GHz quad core cpu's.

Thank god beacuse the 2TB of pst files on my file servers cause them to hang. If you ever want to see a 32bit file server hang just store some psts on it.
 
All I have to say is thank god the company I work for has a 90 day email retention policy. Good luck getting 20GB of email in that time. We get to avoid all the headaches of having to archive huge amounts of email.
 
supermen said:
All I have to say is thank god the company I work for has a 90 day email retention policy. Good luck getting 20GB of email in that time. We get to avoid all the headaches of having to archive huge amounts of email.
Click to expand...

I can accumulate ~10 gigs of e-mail in any given months... and this is work related stuff only... and no I don't work for a design company of any sorts.

(Granted I know better and move all attachments to my personal share on the server, but most users don't know better)
 
Blitz - We are using our seperate SQL server rather than running kvs on the exchange boxes themselves, just currently have only 300GB of space on our sql box, enough to archive our entire mailbox setup twice over, but still something we need to monitor a bit!


And yeah, we know the difficulties in getting people to store attachments on the server, they dont see why they cant just leave them all in outlook so they know where they are....

Fine till they hit the 20GB cap and I can say "ooooh, but you have been archiving, right?"

I have no idea how they find anything, searching one massive folder must take them ages!

Hence the KVS, archive things for them, should help a little at least.

Thanks for the pointers!
 
d3c1us said:
I can accumulate ~10 gigs of e-mail in any given months... and this is work related stuff only... and no I don't work for a design company of any sorts.

(Granted I know better and move all attachments to my personal share on the server, but most users don't know better)
Click to expand...

You mean the deleted items folder isn't where you are supposed to store your important documents with attachments???
 
Morphius143 said:
Blitz - We are using our seperate SQL server rather than running kvs on the exchange boxes themselves, just currently have only 300GB of space on our sql box, enough to archive our entire mailbox setup twice over, but still something we need to monitor a bit!


And yeah, we know the difficulties in getting people to store attachments on the server, they dont see why they cant just leave them all in outlook so they know where they are....

Fine till they hit the 20GB cap and I can say "ooooh, but you have been archiving, right?"

I have no idea how they find anything, searching one massive folder must take them ages!

Hence the KVS, archive things for them, should help a little at least.

Thanks for the pointers!
Click to expand...

If you have large mailboxes I hope you have your users on cached-mode or that would hammer your exchange server when they do seraches.
 
oakfan52 said:
If you have large mailboxes I hope you have your users on cached-mode or that would hammer your exchange server when they do seraches.
Click to expand...

We only have 100 users here, approximately 25% are in cache mode due to remote offices, the rest are not. Although we currently have a fairly decent box running exchange so it doesnt seem to struggle, our file server seems to have a lot more issues, but that is a story for another day!!!
 
oakfan52 said:
If you have large mailboxes I hope you have your users on cached-mode or that would hammer your exchange server when they do seraches.
Click to expand...

Oh that'd be rough. lol

I believe we run an older version of EV; I am not yet responsible for it but I will be soon as I am being promoted (yay!) to cover for the absence of Wintel engineers with any brains. Good info to know.

Oh yeah, why on god's earth would you have Outlook on the same box as EV or Exchange? (You mentioned that in a previous post regarding a fix to that MAPI issue.
 
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