a letter I'd love to write to my fellow employees...

[jecook]

Dear everyone who has a mailbox on the exchange mailstore that is 60 gig in size and growing:

While Yes, the IT department is sitting on a giant pile of disk, none of it is currently availible to the mail server because it can't grok NFS shares, nor does it have a connection to the SAN and it's giant disk*.

We have this diabolical thing called 'storage quotas' for a REASON. The mail server only has a paltry 400 GB disk for the entire company's mailboxes, which was quite reasonable when the machine was purchase over three years ago. And rest assured, the replacement servers, once they are online and in production**, you will have both a full gig and a half at your disposal, and little risk of eating the server's entire file system because you feel the pressing need to save every. single. message. thread. EVER. Same with all the forwarded messages with pictures of people being dumbasses, or the cute forwards of pics from icanhascheesburger.

In summary, your mailbox is not a filing cabinet. Please use your home drive (which, I might add, IS sitting on that giant pile of disk!) instead.

Hugs and kisses,

Your distressed (and soon to be drunk) Exchange admin.

* 10 Tbyte and counting- that's a lotta porn, yo.***
** I'm having this teething problem with Exchange 2010, Unified MEssaging, the existing 2007 environment, the 3rd party MWI server, and trying to automate actions on the user side to flip Outlook out of cached mode, delete the 'voice mail' search folder, close and reopen outlook, re-enable cached mode, and put a nasty note on the screen telling the user to dial into OVA and listen to a voicemail to re-create said search folder which will make E2010's built in MWI service work as advertised again. Yeah, I'm calling M$ Monday and opening a case.
*** I've been resisting the urge to make penis jokes throughout the entire post. SRSLY.

Comments

[gholam.livejournal.com]

You've got NFS and, I assume, FC, but no iSCSI?

[tullamoredew.livejournal.com]

>In summary, your mailbox is not a filing cabinet. Please use your
>home drive (which, I might add, IS sitting on that giant pile of
>disk!) instead.

+aFkinLot!

[fixerkitty.livejournal.com]

^QFT.

[japester.livejournal.com]

No single instance storage?
I hear that saves an awful lot of disk, when employees forward around the photos of their kid, pet, sister, rock, etc.
and the same again for when documents are forwarded around the entire organisation.

What the hell are they doing to create 60GB mailspools though? I've found that most Large! mailboxes are around 5-10GB.

[jecook]

IIRC, There's roughly 200 users on that mailstore.

[bothunter.livejournal.com]

Exchange has Single Instance Storage, but it only helps so much.

[ximinez]

I bet more users would be willling to take stuff off of the server if the autoarchive functionality wasn't so notoriously unreliable at losing important messages.

[sithanas.livejournal.com]

Psh, just 10tb? Sitting on 34 over here plus another 32 of fibre disk for video work.

Of course, my Exchange box only gets 300gb of that for mailstore use and I lock my users to 2gb each with a no exception policy on store size (except for the vice president because she could fire my ass). You should consider adding an iSCSI head to the SAN or NFS systems you have and sharing out some of that space to your Exchange environment.

[jecook]

Considering the new environment is almost entirely virtual servers except for the UM box, on the SAN entirely, and double the size of the old environment in every way, I just need to get this stupid migration problem resolved, and then there will be a couple days of heartbreak as I migrate everyone from the old crap to the new systems.

As for the storage, I'm pretty sure we have more then 10 Tbyte of disk, I'm just not sure how it's allocated at the moment.

[sithanas.livejournal.com]

Why not virtualize Exchange? It's a supported config now in 2010 and it was unsupported but worked great in 2007. Mine is sitting on top of vSphere now.

[jecook]

Unified Messaging requires a physical server for guaranteed processor time. It's the only reason we have a single physical server- the rest of the farm (two CAS, 3 Mbox) is all virtual, as noted in my previous reply. :D

[ravenofdreams.livejournal.com]

You could not PAY me enough (money/booze/hot men/shiny gadgets/any combination thereof) to get me to be an Exchange admin again. I feel your pain.

[natalie-i-am.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reminding me, next time I'm in work I need to trim those emails between me and my colleagues that are not relevant to work...
I've been tossing them into archive folders for about 2 years.

[cheezemeister-x.livejournal.com]

Why do you allow people to have mailboxes that big in the first place? I assume that since you're an exchange admin you know that you can restrict mailbox size. Where I work, when you hit quota you can't send any e-mail until you clean up.

[jecook]

That mailstore is home to... oh, roughly 200 users. Most of them are decent about not hitting the ~975 MB hard cap we have, but like most places, there's always gotta be a few packrats in the group. :(

And yes, they hit the hard cap and make a delectable *thud* noise to our support monkeys.

[japester.livejournal.com]

Is the entire mailstore 60GB, or some users have 60GB?

I originally thought it was the latter, but some later comments imply the former.

[jecook]

It's the former- the entire store is 60 Gb. Makes for a pain in the ass for doing restores. :)

[cheezemeister-x.livejournal.com]

Your first sentence states that the mailboxes are 60G and growing; that's what caused the confusion.

[cheezemeister-x.livejournal.com]

And a 60G mailstore for 200 users isn't that big. I've seen MANY companies with much larger stores for that number of users.

[japester.livejournal.com]

ahh, *only* 60GB for the mailstore. That's not so bad, all considered.

Previous place of poorly managed mail servers had ~400 users and 800GB of mail. Their estimated growth was ~40% a year, and looking back, they've managed to keep to their estimates too.

[biggeek.livejournal.com]

Schedule an audit for the mailstore for mp3s and video files. Warn your users that all such files will be deleted unless it's business related.

Then sit back and watch the ensuing chaos.

[jecook]

Interesting idea. Might be worth it on the folks who are either at their cap or close to it.


We already have that rule in effect for their home folders, at least- we got tired, for example, of backing up the support tech's synched music archives from their iDevices.