SBS 2003 Exchange Storage Full

Posted on February 18th, 2009 in Howtos, MS Exchange, Windows Admin by Rodney

In a previous post, we talked about increasing the size of the mail store in Exchange 2003, on Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. However this won’t necessarily clear all your Exchange storage woes. In fact, it’s very common for people to complain that although they have a 75GB limit, they’re finding that Exchange is telling them they are out of space when their storage file is only a few GB!

Event logs such as the following begin to appear in the Application Log on the server.
The database "First Storage Group\Public Folder Store (SERVERNAME)" has 1 megabyte of free space after online defragmentation has terminated.

In the example above, the Public Folder Store is in fact about 2MB – yet Exchange is complaining it has nearly filled the full 75GB. Below outlines the steps to correct this.

What to do about it
1. First you will need to bring the store offline. This means people cannot access it, so you have to think about timing. This is done as follows:

  • Open Exchange System Manager
  • Right click on the information store that you want to defrag and click Dismount Store.

2. Open the command prompt and use the eseutil in the Exchange bin folders, with the “/d” option. For example:

  • “C:\program files\exchsrvr\bin\eseutil” /d “e:\exchsrvr\mdbdata\pub1.edb”

Be warned – for a really big store this could take hours.

3. Remount the Exchange store you dismounted.

  • Open Exchange System Manager
  • Right click on the information store that you want to defrag and click Mount Store.

4. Check your event logs. They should say something about having plenty of free space.

Why is this necessary?
An excellent question. Personally, I don’t think it should be necessary but it unfortunately often is. Exchange holds space in the database for deleted files and also uncompresses a lot of data. This causes the storage potential of the database to grow rapidly and outstrip the reality of the file sizes and actual storage requirements. Using eseutil actually creates a brand new, compressed database and replaces the original one. Here’s what Microsoft say on their website about it:

“…The defragmentation option makes used storage contiguous, eliminates unused storage, and compacts the database, which reduces the database’s size. Eseutil copies database records to a new database. When defragmentation is complete, the original database is deleted or saved to a user-specified location, and the new version is renamed as the original. If the utility encounters a bad record, the utility stops and displays an error message…”

After completing the above, you should have plenty of free space made available in your Exchange mail stores. You may also wish to create a batch file to run as a scheduled task to do this once a month or however often is needed, in the early hours of the morning, so it doesn’t interrupt users. The batch file would need to stop the exchange services, compress and defrag all the mail stores as above, then restart the Exchange services.

Increasing Mail Store in Exchange 2003

Posted on January 8th, 2009 in Howtos, MS Exchange, Windows Admin by Rodney

Owners of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 have often complained that the Exchange server hard limits the mail store size to 16GB. These days – 16GB of email isn’t that much – especially when you have many users.

However, this limit is not actually a hard limit. You can in fact increase the mail store up to 75GB, very easily. You won’t even have to do a reboot.

Here’s how:

Step 1.
Download and install the Exchange 2003 Service pack 2. You can download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=535bef85-3096-45f8-aa43-60f1f58b3c40&displaylang=en

Step 2.
Open your prefered registry editor. For example:
Start > run > regedit.

Step 3.
Find the following registry keys.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\{Your Server name}\Private-Mailbox Store GUID
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\{Your Server name}\Public-Public Store GUID

Step 4.
Add these new DWORDS to both of those keys;
DWORD: Database Size Limit in Gb
Value: Between 1 and 75 (in decimal)
(This is the mailstore size)

DWORD: Database Size Buffer in Percentage
Value: Between 1 and 100
(This is the % free at which warnings will start. 10% is fine).

DWORD: Database Size Check Start Time in Hours From Midnight
Value: Between 0 and 23
(This is the time of day the mailstore will be size checked. Do it off peak).

Step 5.
Restart your Exchange services. If you view the Application logs, you should see the mail size has now increased from 16GB to whatever value you used.