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Create a Mailbox Database

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Applies to: Exchange Server 2010

You can create a mailbox database, which is a unit of granularity where mailboxes are created and stored. A mailbox database is stored as an Exchange database (.edb) file.

Looking for other management tasks related to mailbox databases? Check out Managing Mailbox Databases.

Prerequisites

  • For reliability, and in some cases for performance reasons, the database should be placed on disks that don't contain transaction logs.
  • Page zeroing is a process performed at the end of a streaming backup in which the data within the database is overwritten with characters that you have selected for that purpose. This makes the data unrecoverable by conventional means. As a best practice, if you want to enable page zeroing on a database, you should do so when you create the database. If you don't configure page zeroing when you create the database, the first time page zeroing is run against the database, it will significantly impact server performance.

What Do You Want to Do?

  • Use the EMC to create a mailbox database
  • Use the Shell to create a mailbox database

Use the EMC to create a mailbox database

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Mailbox database" entry in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

  1. In the console tree, navigate to Organization Configuration > Mailbox.
  2. In the action pane, click New Mailbox Database. The New Mailbox Database wizard appears.
  3. On the Introduction page, type a name for the new mailbox database in the Mailbox database name field. The name can be up to 64 characters in length and can't include the following characters: \ / " = , ;. Click Browse to locate the server on which you will create the database, select the server, and then click OK. Click Next.
  4. On the Set Paths page, click Browse if you want to change the location of the Database file path. Then click Browse under the Log folder path to change the location of the log folder path for this mailbox database. Select the Mount this database check box if you want to mount this database. Mounting a database puts it online, making its data available to users. Click Next.
  5. On the New Mailbox Database page, click New to create the mailbox database.
  6. On the Completion page, confirm whether the new mailbox database was created successfully. A status of Completed indicates that the wizard completed the task successfully. A status of Failed indicates that the task wasn't completed. If the task fails, review the summary for an explanation, and then click Back to make any configuration changes.
  7. Click Finish to complete the New Mailbox Database wizard. The new mailbox database appears on the Database Management tab.

Use the Shell to create a mailbox database

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Mailbox database" entry in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

This example creates the mailbox database MailboxDatabase01 and specifies where to create the .edb database file.

New-MailboxDatabase -Name "MailboxDatabase01" -EdbFilePath D:\DatabaseFiles\MailboxDatabase01.edb

This example creates the mailbox database MailboxDatabase01 and specifies where to create the .edb database file and the log folder path.

New-MailboxDatabase -Name "MailboxDatabase01" -EdbFilePath D:\DatabaseFiles\MailboxDatabase01.edb -LogFolderPath D:\DatabaseFiles\LogFolder

This example mounts the newly created database MailboxDatabase01.

Mount-Database -Identity "MailboxDatabase01"

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see New-MailboxDatabase and Mount-Database.