Moving Exchange mailboxes during online defrag...

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...Don't do it

Schoolboy error time

I've been rationalising the Exchange infrastructure where I work and created multiple Storage Groups & DBs (everything was on one mailbox store - only 160Gb but enough to make me nervous - and was running out of room on the SAN vol it was allocated to). This weekend I'm moving the mailboxes into the new SGs. Everything running smoothly until now... Started another few copies about an hour ago and they are running like a dog. Started to get a bit freaked then realised - of course, the poxy online defrag is running. Currently moving them at about a tenth the speed they were earlier... and getting more nervous by the minute as the process slows down seemingly with every message it moves LOL

 

LOL - sounds like fun! I've finished doing moves this weekend - the last lot of four took about 2 hours to move and they were only a Gb in size. I think its because the old store is so fragmented and because the new store has about 70-odd gb worth of logfiles to play back in. I'm just running a full backup now, hoping that fixes the problem - otherwise performance is gonna be dreadful tomorrow morning (last night's 1221 event after the online defrag showed some 50Gb of whitespace in the original SG!!). I need to get enough off the original store to be able to run an offline defrag on it - at the moment I still need to get, like, seventy users off there before there's 110% free space. Nightmare - but thats what happens when Exchange installs aren't planned properly!

 

Yes I've seen that before and if it is Exchange 2003 and the IMF is running then the thing gets real slow if there is a flurry of spam to deal with...

 

Well, here I am - another weekend and more Exchange woes!

We had a disaster earlier this week - our 24x7x365 data centre went tits up after some 'non-intrusive' UPS maintenance knocked our entire infrastructure out. We've recovered from it (after some fun and games with our MPLS link, resolved when I discovered the power outage had knocked out an individual switch port (not the whole switch, just one port) and had to reconfigure the link on another port)

However, this unexpected blip screwed up our Exchange maintenance - I'm now back to moving users across to new Storage Groups. Unfortunately - and this is where I'm starting to get peeved - moving anyone's mailbox from the old store to the new ones is taking forever now - I moved a 1.2 Gb mailbox earlier and it took close on 3 hours to move. This is much, much slower than previous moves of mailboxes of a similar size. I'm pretty sure its because of all the whitespace in the original store - does anyone have chapter & verse on whether this is likely to be the cause? I must say I've performed similar maintenance on at least five other installs and never had even a sniff of the problems I'm having here...

 

I am no Exchange guru as you know Zeb but i'm not sure if your aware of potential problems that can involve network performance with the introduction of SNP on Server 2003.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/07/18/446400.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594

 

Cheers Pete, but the server is still running SP1 - and 912222 hasn't been installed - largely because of the problems with Scalable Networking. It killed our ISA server stone dead when we installed SP2 a few months back so I'm aware of the havoc it can wreak! For my money enabling RSS and the TCP Chimney BY DEFAULT in SP2 is the stupidest, most boneheaded thing I can remember M$ doing in a long time.