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nmmhelpdeskFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Exchange 2003 Database Defrag

I am about to do the first ever defrag on our exchange database and am just looking for a bit of moral support and advise that I am doing the right thing.

We run an A/A/P cluster for exchange with a virtual server. The database resides on the SAN and is mounted as an S:\ drive.

My plan was to login to the virtual server, dismount the store and then run eseutil from the command prompt and use the following line.

c:\exchsrvr\bin>eseutil /d S:\EXCHSRVR\MDBDATA\MailStore1.edb

Does that look about right and am I on the right lines here?

The .edb database is 26Gb and the .stm database is almost 10Gb.

How long might it take and is there anything I need to keep an eye out for. I am particularly nervous about doing it as the servers have been in for over 3 years and this has never been done.

Thanks,
Kev
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Manpreet SIngh Khatra
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The command is perfect
So do we have about 110% free space of the DB that would be 42gb of free space on the C drive.
this would run at a speed of 4-5 Gb per hour.
Also would like to inform you that you would have to run the Isinteg command to remove any logical corruption. As once the Offline defrag is done the pages in the B-tree of the DB would be moved so we have to set the pointers correctly and that would be done by Isinteg and it would run at a speed of 10-12 Gb per hour and no free space is required.
The time depends on the performance of your machine, if you have better performing pc then it would take less time.

The following url may give all the required commands to defrag Exchange databases

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-ISINTEG-ESEUTIL.html

If you are too cautious, then take a backup of the "Information Group". It is better to backup the information group instead of information store alone.

You may use the ntbackup available in Windows itself.

Type ntbackup in the "Start -> Run"  or look at the url
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-2003-Backup-Restore-NTBACKUP.html


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ASKER

There is over 110% of the size of the DB's available on the S:\drive which is where the DB's reside. However there is also free space on the virtual machines c:\drive which is big enough.
Do i should run the isinteg first? Does the DB have to be dismounted first?
You would have to dismount the DB and first run the defrag and once completed isinteg
the command for Isinteg would be
Isinteg -s <server name (NBIOS)> -fix -test alltests
So first run the defrag and then the isinteg, is that correct?
run the isinteg using the virtual server net bios name?
c:\program files\exchsrvr\bin>ininteg -s email -fix -test alltests
email is the virtual server name, original isn't it?
 
Also does it actually need a defrag run on it?
 
yes thats correct. Yes you have to run the defrag and then isinteg.
Am I better off just leaving well alone, or is it good practise?
i didnt get leaving what ?
Sorry I meant, am I best off just not doing the defrag at all as we are not currently having any issues or running low on space?
yeah thats the best but if you are planning at any opoint of time do remember to do an isinteg as i can cause a lot of issue to users.
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Manpreet SIngh Khatra
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Sure can thanks for all your help, am happier leaving it. Appreciated though.

Kev