Test defrag of database in exchange 2007 sp1
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Jpeevey
70 pts.
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Test defrag of database in exchange 2007 sp1
Exchange databases, Exchange Backup & Restore, Exchange Backup, Exchange 2007, Exchange 2007 SP1
We do not have a test environment and I would like to make a copy of the database on storage group 1 that needs to be defraged after all the mailbox moves to other storage groups/databases.

Question: What is the best way to copy and move it without taking the email system down?

Question: When defraging the copied database from what I have read, I will only need to dismount it. I will not need to stop any services, is this right.

Question: I am trying to determine the downtime we will have and any issues we may encounter while defraging the live db, is this the best method?
ASKED: Apr 13 2009  1:56 PM GMT
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Technochic
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You would have to dismount the database to copy it first of all. But if you are going to move all the mailboxes out of that database there is no need to copy the database before defragging it. If it has trouble mounting after the defrag and it is empty, worst case scenario is you delete it and mount the database and a new one will be created. That actually is the fastest thing to do anyway.
As far as defragging goes, you are correct, you do not have to stop any services to dismount and defrag a mail store.
As far as downtime, again if you have moved all mailboxes out of that store then there will be no downtime to the end users while that database is being defragged (at that point just delete it and re-mount the store to create a new one, why waste time defragging it at all?) If there are mailboxes in the store then the downtime depends on the size of the database and how much white space is going to be reclaimed. I can't give you a rule of thumb here. Too many variables, including how many processors, how much memory, how much throughput on the system during the planned defrag etc. The larger the database the longer a defrag will take, that much I can tell you. Try to keep your mailstores to a reasonable size, 60GB or less is a reasonable size.
Last Answered: Apr 13 2009  2:44 PM GMT by Technochic   40210 pts.
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Jpeevey   70 pts.  |   Apr 13 2009  5:12PM GMT

The issue is I need to know the estimated downtime it will take to plan, that is why I thought I would make a copy to test the downtime.

From the above email I understand I would need to dismount the database I want to copy. The size of the db is around 100GB and I would need to copy it to another storage group. Then remount the original database and defrag the copied database that I copied into the other storage group.

Has anyone copied a db this size?

Thanks

 

Fontanatech   265 pts.  |   May 7 2009  12:54AM GMT

I just ran a defrag last saturday on a 68gb priv1.edb and it took 12 hours. I wrote about my experience a little bit at blog.jimmystewart.me if you are interested…

 
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