Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

marryxmas

I would like to wish Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my friends, Students and visitors. I would not have gone this far without your support and I do appreciate it.
I am wishing you and your lovely families all the best, great Xmas and Happy New year, also I wish the New Year will bring good health and high spirits to all of you.

–oz

Best

Oz ozugurlu MVP (Exchange)

MCITP (EMA), MCITP (EA) MCITP (SA),

MCSE (M+, S+) MCDST, Security+, Server +, Project+

Blog: http://smtp25.blogspot.com/

Blog:https://telnet25.wordpress.com/

 

 

Offline defrag & Exchange maintenance

Should offline defrag be considered as one of the scheduled maintenance task for Exchange administrators? The short answer is going to be “No”. The simple reason behind this, taking Exchange offline will cause “Outage” and if there is no space gain (white space, 30 percent usable space) there is no point of performing offline defragmentation at any cost.

Let me state this up front, those of you who are running enterprise version of Exchange should never perform offline defrag and cause outage, you need to create empty database and move user mailboxes

(In the night& off business hours) onto it and delete the old one contains white space. (Assuming you does have at least, one mail store available to achieve this goal.)

The process behind running offline defrags is that, exchange wont takes existing database and remove the white pages out the database and makes it ready to use. It Instead it copies used pages from old database and creates new database. When copy pages finishes it re-point the logs to the new database and it assigns nee signature to it.

How do we know if we need to perform offline defragmentation, the Exchange server’s application logs “1221” will tell you how much white space (unusable)

Here is great article goes deep into 1221

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeremyk/archive/2004/04/09/110553.aspx

Here is MS team blog goes deep into

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/07/08/177574.aspx

Best,

Oz ozugurlu MVP (Exchange)

MCITP (EMA) , MCITP (EA ) MCITP(SA),

MCSE (M+,S+) MCDST, Security+, Server +,Project+

Blog: http://www.smtp25.blogspot.com/

Dedicated Active Directory Sites for Exchange 2007

I remember it used to be the best practice for placing the Exchange servers to its own site in Exchange 2003. To protect the DC/GC and dedicate them exchange usage only, and not letting other processes to eat up all DC/GC resources in multimaster replication model, we even lift the “DC locator DNs SRV Records” and give higher priority so that those DC/GC should be used by exchange only.
The problem is hard coding “DSAccess” causes the single point of failure if dedicated DC’s are not accessible. Putting Exchange to its own site, will force exchange (DSAccess) to located DC’s within its site fist, and it they are no accessible they will go out and located other DC’s so that exchange remains happy and functionally.

Placing DC/GC ratio is 1:4, meaning 1 DC/GC per 4 Exchange servers, for Exchange 2007 1 DC/GC for per mailbox server. (Details in the following article)

How do all these apply to Exchange 2007? If you remember the changes in Exchange 2007 structure, “Site base routing” you will make you, predict a close guess and know dedicated DC/GC is not recommended for Exchange 2007.

I always wondered why we could not have more control over DSaccess, such as hard code it for specific server and at the same time being able to say, if these wont response go discover automatically any available GC or even tell it where to go second? Maybe next version of exchange (-:, who knows

Here is excellent article at Exchange Team Blog.

Best,

Oz ozugurlu MVP (Exchange)

MCITP (EMA) , MCITP (EA ) MCITP(SA),

MCSE (M+,S+) MCDST, Security+, Server +,Project+

Blog: http://www.smtp25.blogspot.com/