I have a Exchange 2007 SP1 server running on Windows 2008
6 HD Drives in a RAID-1
OS, DB, Logs on separate RAID-1 Disks
Size of the Mailbox Database is 183GB and increasing
We only have First Storage Group and Second Storage Group
There is no more space on the server to install new Physical Disks and create a Storage Group
Q – Can I resize the RAID-1 Partition where the DB is ?
Q – Any other suggestions as to how I can decrease the Mailbox DB Size ?
Will be grateful for your suggestions on this.
Kind Regards
Best Answer
Good news is that Exchange 2007 SP1 has database portability, meaning you can dismount the databases, move them and remount them with no ill effects other than down time. ( http://support.microsoft.com/?id=555603 )
Bad news is that your company will have to spend money.
The biggest challenge for Exchange with large datastores is I/O. You can get huge drives now (like 2TB) but the random I/O of Exchange will quickly swamp most storage. So you need to split your datastore into multiple smaller DS spread out across more disks. Expensive.
Best solutions is to get another server and dedicate it as a mailbox server only and keep you existing server as a CAS server. Again, expensive.
I think I would look at getting an add-in SCSI controller and adding a set of external hard drives.
Another cheaper option (although slower) is to move the datastores off to iSCSI storage made from a box running some free iSCSI software like FreeNAS.
Whatever you decide, do it before you run out of room!!
HTH
Mike