Some of my Exchange 2013 accounts have a giant mailbox, and Outlook runs very SLOW, I want to create a separate Archive Mailbox.
I think the best practice to do this is to create a new Exchange Database on my server called (for example) "archived_mailbox" and then enable the "archiving" compliance to the new DB on the recipients page of ECP.
Do you think it is really the best practice?
By creating a NEW Db in Exchange, does it affect with the running current database or it is totally independent from the giant current active Mailbox Database?
I don't want to create a problem with current running DB…
Thanks for your help…
Best Answer
Before I answer your question a few important bits of info.
There are many factors that would cause an exchange email account to run slow. The first step you can take to improve outlook performance locally is to take the users with extremely large mailboxes and disable Cached Exchange Mode from outlook account settings on there PC. OST file can slow things down for very large mailbox. When you enable archiving for an Exchange email account it basically does the same thing with emails that are in the archive.
Enabling in-place archiving will not necessarily improve performance. Depends on many factors in your environment. I suggest testing it on a user account. The procedure is reversible.
The idea behind using exchange in-place archiving is not to necessarily improve performance for a single user account but for other storage considerations. Many admins will enable archiving in order to off-load less frequently accessed emails to slower and cheaper storage and keep the high-performance storage for recent mail.
Also its very important that you meet the license requirements for office user clients. In almost all cases you have to use Office professional or better. The reason is accessing and viewing outlook archives is only available for professional office licences. If the user is on standard they will be unable to see the archived mailbox. Refer to chart here to know if you can use this feature.
To answer your question, you can create another database and it will not affect your existing mailbox database. Just remember the standard version of exchange 2013 is limited to 5 databases (enterprise to 50).
Exchange performance is affected much more by the amount of items in a mailbox. Not the size of the mailbox.