• Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server

    Defragment and Repair Exchange Information Stores

    An Exchange Information Store is a database. A Standard Exchange Server can host 3 Information Store databases. Each is a Jet database and can exist at its own file path and will have a .edb file extension. You can manually defrag an Exchange database using a tool called eseutil. In this case, you’ll encounter from 5 to 20 minutes of downtime per gig of the Information Store. You can run eseutil, Eseutil can be run to scan a database to determine whether an offline defragmentation is necessary. You can run eseutil to manually determine the space that could be saved with a defrag. To do so, run eseutil with the…

  • Xsan

    Don't Defrag the Whole SAN

    I see a numer of environments that are running routine defragmentation scripts on Xsan volumes. I do not agree with this practice, but given certain edge cases I have watched it happen. When defragmenting a volume, there is no reason to do so to the entire volume. Especially if much of the content is static and not changing very often. And if specific files doesn’t have a lot of extents then they are easily skipped. Let’s look at a couple of quick ways to narrow down your defrag using snfsdefrag. The first is by specifying the path. In this case you would specify a -r option and follow that with…