Friday, June 25, 2010

Re: Exchange 2007 - management/maintenance workload

I run a three-server Exchange 2007 set up at Key for just over 500 mailboxe=
s, all virtualized on VMware. I barely touch it, mostly to track down spam =
false-positives or create new accounts / distribution lists.

S
---
Steven Dickenson <sdickenson@keyschool.org>
Computer Network Manager
The Key School, Annapolis Maryland

-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators [mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.=
EDU] On Behalf Of JPDS Tech
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2010 2:03 PM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Exchange 2007 - management/maintenance workload

We are a small school, with under 100 email accounts. We are considering a
shift from POP3 to Exchange 2007 but I am concerned about adding a great
deal of administrative overhead. The proposed new set-up would be Exchange
2007 running on (VMWare-virtualized) Server 2008; we would continue to use
Postini to reduce our spam load. We're hoping to achieve universal access
for staff and shared calendars and distribution lists. I also hope that th=
e
SIS described in the thread below will reduce our storage requirements. =20

I'm aware that Google Apps and Microsoft Live offer these things but I'm
specifically asking about Exchange 2007. One techie tells me that 2007 is
so stable that there is little maintenance work. Would I be taking on a
nightmare of administrative tasks? I am a one-person tech office.

With trepidation,

Dan Berger


-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of TJ Rainsford
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:01 PM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Re: Public Folders Exchange 2003 and iPhones

Renee:

If only it were that simple :-)

In order to reclaim disk space and white space when users clean up email,
you actually have to run a offline defrag of the Information Store in
Exchange. This is actually something that should be done on a regular basi=
s
as part of maintenance (the interval is dependent on the how big your
information stores are). It is a pretty straight forward task but must
necessarily be done after hours as it will take down any users who are part
of the specific information store as long as the process is running.

Running regular offline defrags is a really good idea. Not only will it
clean up disk space, it will compress the information stores (and defrag
them) which will improve overall performance and keep the system happy.

Please note that this is NOT a disk defrag! In fact, running a disk
defragmentation process on the disk where your Exchange data resides is a
fundamentally BAD idea (things will likely go BOOM in a really bad way).
And as with all major maintenance, make DARN sure you have a backup of
EVERYTHING (the OS, server system state, Exchange databases, etc) before
doing this.

TJ

TJ Rainsford
E: tjrainsford@gmail.com

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