The above approaches sound good to me. One way I have dealt with this is to setup another instance of Exchange on another drive fed by forwarding from the original or just as is with a different domain host name on a seldom used IP leg.

Exchange is a Jet style product and you can xfer the mde style files anywhere and import them into the new instance of Exchange. I don.t remember the file extension names. If your product is pre-2000 versions, you can only have one per physical server unless you use the virtual manager cited above. Of course, if your metrics will be topology sensitive, different physical servers would skew your results.

These links are relevant:
http://www.swinc.com/resources/exchange/faq_db.asp?status=questions&faqID=1001&faqname=Exchange+2000&sectionID=1024&sectionName=Exchange+2000+Move+Server+Method

http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/ftp/3350.pdf#search='multiple%20exchange%20server%20instances‘

Good luck and please post your denouement,
Gene

Thanks,
Mike