Exchange 2013 database full

Question

Hi all, Hope you can give me a hand with this problem. My exchange database is so big that I can not defrag it on the same disk (the sice is 350GB and free space is 37GB). I have an external NAS with enough space. Would it be possible to defrag using eseutil and use that NAS as temporary destination???. If so, could you please send me commands to do that?. If not, any idea???? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Great points by AndyDavid and sounds as though you may want to consider additional hard disk space for this server and use move mailboxes to a new DB . I say that because unless you are freeing up a whole bunch of whitespace you will be doing this again in the future. Also remember the destination defragmentation drive needs to have 110% of the DB size in free space.

Another option that does have some limitations would be to use a dial tone recovery as outlined here https://support.lucid8.com/support/solutions/articles/6000167684-dial-tone-recovery This would allow you to restore all or part of the data and downtime would be minimal. That said, as AndyDavid said the first thing you want to to do is determine the whitespace available in the DB

Search, Recover, & Extract Mailboxes, Folders, & Email Items from Offline Exchange Mailbox and Public Folder EDB's and Live Exchange Servers or Import/Migrate direct from Offline EDB to Any Production Exchange Server, even cross version i.e. 2003 --> 2007 --> 2010 --> 2013 --> 2016 --> 2019 --> Exchange Online with Lucid8's DigiScope

Answer 2

Its better to bring up a new database and move the mailboxes to it and remove the old database
If that is not possible,
How much white space is available? You should know that before doing any offline defrag. You will need to take the database offline and check with eseutil to know the true amount with ESEUTIL /MS
https://blog.rmilne.ca/2013/08/20/how-to-check-database-white-space-in-exchange/

You can defrag to a network drive:

https://www.itprotoday.com/email-and-calendaring/defragment-exchange-database-using-network-drive
Q. Can I defragment an Exchange database using a network drive if I don't have enough space locally?

A. Yes, you can use the /t switch with the Eseutil utility to specify a local or remote location as the temporary folder to be used for the database to be defragmented. Using a remote location might slow down the defragmentation process, however. In the example below, I specified the Z drive, which maps to a network path (or you can use a UNC path), and a temporary file name for the database.

Example:

C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin>eseutil /d "c:\program files\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.edb" /tz:\tempdfrg.edb

Answer 3

@Juanma Gómez

This article introduce about Exchange database whitespace:

84M is not a problem, if there has a lot of white space after the mailbox is migrated, you can just use the above methods to release it.

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Answer 4

Thanks for all you replies. They have been very helpful.

After all, what I decided is (and I have some doubts):
1.- Create a new database on another internal hard disk
2.- Move mailboxes to the new database
3.- Once all mailboxes are moved, copy database to the original folder (where it was the old one). But at this point, how do I tell exchange server that the new database will be the correct one?

Or I do have another idea:
1.- Use eseutil and an internal hard disk as a temporary folder. But my question is, that temporary folder will contain the new database and the old one will be deleted?. Or do I have to do everything manually (I mean, delete the old one and copy the one on the hard disk).

Thanks.