Exchange: Questions About Your Exchange Server

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mokkapoop

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 6, 2005
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Well....I am curious how things run in other companies. In our company, we have about 450 users. All users have an unlimited size on their mailbox (my fiance's company only allows for 300mb of space for each user). Some of our users have 20gb+ mailboxes....which they complain about being "slow".

Well no shit....


So...what is typical for your company? Do you allow unlimted mailbox sizes? How much storage space do your users take up on exchange? Ours is over 3-4terabytes...for only 10-12 years.

I find this annoying as hell.
 
100m for most users
500 for managers sups
2.0gb for executives...

We setup old items to archive to our file server after 6 months... which helps alot, this only works for ppl in office though, as remote reps don't really work so well.. they just have to delete.

backups every day, with archive done every 3 months for retention.


We ran out of space on our old exchange server, which totally sux because if it's out of hdd space, and you have everything in 1 store, then there's nowhere to run eseutil to try and shrink it as a temp fix... you are basically screwed, had to copy 90gb to a different server, run util, copy back just to get exchange back up and running while we could get more space... New server is setup alot differently, but it's not running out of space now with restrictions.
 
Verge said:
100m for most users
500 for managers sups
2.0gb for executives...

We setup old items to archive to our file server after 6 months... which helps alot, this only works for ppl in office though, as remote reps don't really work so well.. they just have to delete.

backups every day, with archive done every 3 months for retention.


We ran out of space on our old exchange server, which totally sux because if it's out of hdd space, and you have everything in 1 store, then there's nowhere to run eseutil to try and shrink it as a temp fix... you are basically screwed, had to copy 90gb to a different server, run util, copy back just to get exchange back up and running while we could get more space... New server is setup alot differently, but it's not running out of space now with restrictions.
Click to expand...

How many users? I envy you guys....this is insane over here....
 
250 meg warning
325 meg no sending email

Only one exception to that rule, the president can still send email.
With the 75 meg difference between warning/can not send I get very few users that hit the can not send because of how many days they get nagged that they are over their limit.
 
mokkapoop said:
How many users? I envy you guys....this is insane over here....
Click to expand...

probably about 500 or so, all 3 information stores are around 40gb right now... Once exchange craps on itself with no hdd space, it gets easier to implement rules and such... especially since we had been warning them repeatedly, and had emails to prove it.
 
175mb Warn
200mb No Send
The exception is anyone with a laptop gets 2Gb of storage.
~85 users total
 
There's only six of us at the office, two of whom own the company, so we don't really do anything for limits. I just yell at them when they get over a couple gig and remind to archive to our file server.

Clients on the other hand, depends on the size of the organization and whether they run SBS or not. We have a few school districts that have 1000+ mailboxes each. They have four different sets of users. The basic teachers and staff have 200/250 limits. The next level, which are administrative staff, get 300/350. Then the bigwigs and some of the IT staff have unlimited mailboxes with warnings at the 1GB mark. Auto-archive is setup for once a month on the smaller mailboxes and every 3 months for the unlimited users.
 
Execs got what ever because you cant tell them to limit there email. Turn off Exchange cache on the client and they are good. Remember keep the people with money happy. IT rule number one, I beleive.

200 megs for everyone at my last company. Working there a few years my mailbox was only 60 megs. Trust me, you dont need those, "Hey where we going for lunch?" emails.
 
mokkapoop said:
Well....I am curious how things run in other companies. In our company, we have about 450 users. All users have an unlimited size on their mailbox (my fiance's company only allows for 300mb of space for each user). Some of our users have 20gb+ mailboxes....which they complain about being "slow".

Well no shit....


So...what is typical for your company? Do you allow unlimted mailbox sizes? How much storage space do your users take up on exchange? Ours is over 3-4terabytes...for only 10-12 years.

I find this annoying as hell.
Click to expand...

Dude, i can't believe your store is 3 - 4 terabytes. Good luck in recovering that in your DR scenario. Or running ESEUTIL. What kind of industry are you in? Are you regulated?

One of our exchange instances has similar amount of users. 250MB for most users, rest is archived to Enterprise Vault, 2 GB for senior management. Our store is around 200 GB.

Your story reminds me of a Microsoft blog entry, where a law firm had a similar sized store (if not larger) and when upgrading servers, it took a full week to move one guys mailbox (20GB) from one to another...
 
We have unlimited. I work at a lawfirm so I guess its standard.

Biggest inbox I just checked is 8gb next biggest is 4gb.

I am in the process of moving some mailboxes from one store to another. A little bit of a pain moving the bigger ones thats for sure.

Because we have a few exchange servers I estimate all our stores total about 400-500gb.
 
Temps - 250MB
Employees - 2.5GB
Execs - 4GB

Warnings are sent to both at 2GB.

Large Engineering firm so drawings and plans are often sent via email, both in and out.

Primary Store is on a Dell MD3000 with 8x750GB Drives backed up daily to a ultrium drive.
 
I have 15 exchange servers is use right now.
10 are set up as unlimited as they are law offices or other regulated industries, other 5 have a 800mb warn, 1GB limit.
caching is set on for every client.
Largest mailbox is around 10GB typical is around 600MB.

I have a client with 5 6GB+ pst files and he is the ceo and refuses too delete anything. He has every email since 2000 in there.
Just his deleted items which is in its own pst file is 4GB.
There are 15 users with pst sizes over 10GB in that company.
I dread the day they want too go to exchange.
Right now we use a sync program too sync the pst files too the server for backup on a every other day basis with leave the email on the pop3 server set too 4days.
 
I am a sys admin at a real estate company, when I first started this job we had no storage limits and the Exchange backups were not running. Well at that time I screwed up my message stores and they became corrupted (I had two servers accessing the same iSCSI partition, oops) I had to do a hard repair of the Exchange message databases and transaction logs the message stores alone were over 100 Gigs it took me 3 days to repair, no email for that period, I am surprised that they didn't fire me, my director cut me slack told me he made mistakes as well when he was a new admin. Well any way now we have 150 MB mailbox limits and the users receive a warning at 100 MBs, I also have my message stores and transaction logs on a LeftHand SAN which is clustered with another off site, we also run BackupExec 11d on a GFS backup rotation. You could backup everything on that server including Exchange and SQL just using NTbackup and the built in SQL backup utility actually I met a few IT gurus who only trust NTbackup for Exchange. Just buy 21 external hard drives and label them Mon -Thur, Friday 1-5, and JAN –DEC and store the Fridays and Monthly’s off site, it would be the cheapest way to do it
 
30 users,
500mg average size, 900 for manager, 2gigs for executives. Hosted on a Dual Dual Core Xeon with 8gigs ram. Its fast enough :p
 
I just have unlimited space but I also only service companies with like 20 pcs max, so we always have space.
 
I don't limit so much as monitor. When someone gets over 2GB in their mailbox, I yell at them and tell them to archive their shit in a .pst and I'll back it up on the file server. Granted we only have about 60 users, and a lot of them never even come close to that soft limit. Quotas on the file server and user drives...that's a different story.
 
8500 users
everyone has a 200MB mailbox
every permanent employee has a pst file they can store whatever they want in. pst's are unlimited.
 
has anyone here run the exchange server tools on how to make you exchange server more agile? Anyone here have the RPC ballons once inawhile on BIG files?
 
450 users

175MB Warn
200MB No Send
Executives have a higher warning and no "No Send" limit.

Clients are configured to Auto Archive every two weeks.
Inbox archives anything older than 6 Months.
Sent Items - 2 Weeks.
Deleted Items - 1 Week.

Remote/Laptop users have a user executed batch file that backs up a copy of their Outlook Archive/Personal folders PST to their Personal Folder on the file server. We generally have them run this overnight when they are at home on a high-speed connection. This puts the burden of backing up their stuff on them, which has it's benefits.
 
I don't use an "Exchange" server but a Linux email server and all my mailboxes (400 users) have a 2GB mailbox quota. Their soft quota is 1GB and their hard is 2GB. I have a script I run that tells me who the disk hogs are and I usually notify them to do a cleanup or check to see what is causing the large size. Email should be straight text - no attachments blah blah blah. I force all my uses to send email in plain text and anything that comes into my email server is converted from Rich / HTML into plain text.

I have no problems running my email server and its amazingly fast ... but then again you're using Exchange...I am not.

If you have users with over 10GB mailboxes - that is insane :eek: I can't imaging how bad that email server is bottlenecking as performance and speed goes. You need to re-evaluate your user policy!
 
We have 2GB limits for about 70 users. Most users only have 100-200MB of data, and few have over 500MB. Only 2 users have exceeded the limits, so they were extended to 3GB and 6GB.
 
We have about 3k exchange users.

Our warning limit is 500mb, we have no real ceiling where it actually cuts users off. But I do enjoy people calling up asking how to stop getting the annoying over the mailbox limit emails from showing up in their inbox.
 
150 MB for users - 135 MB is warning - No exceptions. Each user it set up with a personal drive where they can set up Personal Folders and backup whatever, but honestly, 150 MB is big enough. People shouldnt keep files with huge attachments in their mailbox - ARCHIVE people!

Oh...2 Exchange '03 servers with about 500 users over 25 locations :D moving to 2007 late this year
 
Rucanor [X];1032446485 said:
Oh...2 Exchange '03 servers with about 500 users over 25 locations :D moving to 2007 late this year
Click to expand...

That means 64 bit arch...

As for the OP - I think he stated users were filling up close to 20GB unless I completely read that wrong which just blows my mind...
 
Carloswill said:
That means 64 bit arch...

As for the OP - I think he stated users were filling up close to 20GB unless I completely read that wrong which just blows my mind...
Click to expand...

We have multiple people, mostly execs, who have 10-20GB in their mailbox. Its ridiculous, but of course since they are execs, what can we do.
 
I know they're big wigs but I did not know you could have that much email. I think if I saved every piece of email I ever received including junk, I might be at 5GB...but 20GB - thats crazy but you do know you can archive email and separate it from bigging down server and disk performance...just a suggestion.
 
4saken said:
We have multiple people, mostly execs, who have 10-20GB in their mailbox. Its ridiculous, but of course since they are execs, what can we do.
Click to expand...

put your foot down dude.

i can't tell you how many battles i've had with people over shit like this. tell them it fucks with the integrity of the e-mail server, and a mailbox that size has an incredible performance hit on your servers.
 
where do i find the controls for these limits? where in the exchange can I block things like spam? newbie thanks
 
35 users, no limits on their mailbox (though we do warn at 8gb). Largest mailbox is 14gb. I do have policies setup regarding length of time e-mail is retained in specific folders to keep people for have 25k items in their delete items (some users love using their deleted items as an archive, don't ask). In a seperate storge group we have our journaled-mail stores.

We run Exchange 07 with Active/Passive clustered mailbox (two servers) with CAS and Hub roles on another server. We also turned on the antispam function to the Hub role as apposed to the default of running antispam on the Edge Transport.

We do not provide server space for users to store PST's. It only confused my users and in the past when PST's were limited to 2gb having more than one PST really confused my end users. So I made things easy for them.
 
-Sean Casey said:
I do have policies setup regarding length of time e-mail is retained in specific folders to keep people for have 25k items in their delete items (some users love using their deleted items as an archive, don't ask).
Click to expand...

LOL, I run into that all the time with our smaller clients. I had a lawyer that thought that was where you were SUPPOSED to keep the stuff you wanted to save . . . .
 
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