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Hi,
We have an Exchange 2016 server acting as our hybrid server from our 365 migration.
It is now only used for management and message relay for on prem devices and services, it no longer hosts any mailboxes.
Is it possible/recommended to remove the mailbox database from this server?
If so, what is the procedure?
I am considering this removal as the server uses far more memory that it needs, which I suspect is due to it hosting this role.
In an effort to reduce the servers memory footprint, I wanted to remove the database.
Many thanks
James
Any update about this thread now?
If the suggestion below helps, I would suggest you mark it as an answer, which can help users with similar questions.
I'm still taking action on testing, but will of course mark as answered once I'm happy everything is still working after making these changes.
Many thanks.
I would leave it.
Why? It contains all the arbitration/system mailboxes and you need those for audit logging and so Exchange itself can run.
Thanks for the reply.
We are unlikely to use any of the audit features or such, as we are cloud only mailboxes, and the server is there purely for management and relay.
At a previous company we had the same setup, but the whole server sat nicely within 6GB of RAM, but this one is using dynamic memory of around 22GB
We are currently memory constrained on our Hyper-V environment, so I'd love to get its memory usage down if it is possible to do so.
Is perhaps another option to create a new, smaller database that will perhaps have a smaller footprint?
Many thanks
James
I've decided to just leave as is for the time being, as dismounting has already dropped memory usage a decent amount.
It's probably therefore more hassle than it's worth.
We will likely be migrating from Hyper-V to ESXi in the near future, so may deploy a fresh server as part of that for Hybrid Exchange to ensure I have full knowledge of its deployment and ensure it is as streamlined as possible.
Then it's just a case of waiting for Microsoft to provide alternatives to this management process/hybrid exchange server.
Thanks
James
Yep, if things look good then you can remove, however please note
If a new CU is released that contains updates or a security patch is released that you should apply, then it may fail if the database and/or system mailboxes are missing.
You can recreate the system mailboxes and a new database if needed
To recreate the system mailboxes:
Thank you!
If you could please mark as an accepted answer so we can close this up. Thank you!
I will do once I've given it a soak test and happy it's all still functional after deleting the DB (in the next couple of days).
Many thanks.
a smaller database wont use less memory though.
Why not simply dismount the database and see how the memory looks? If the server is functional after that, you could leave the database dismounted.
I will dismount it and see what memory utilization is like.
I would say then that if the server remains functional, could I simply remove the database?
At my previous company, I don't recall us having a database on our hybrid server.
Many thanks
James