This weekend we scheduled time to defrag on 9 out of the 13 databases. But, after doing research on the internet I have seen several articles suggesting staying away from the utility that it can cause more trouble than what it is worth.Their suggestion was tomove all the mailboxes to another store take the old store offline, delete the edb file and bring the store back online and it will create a fresh (empty)EDB file which you can then re-seed to the passive node.I performed a defrag about a year ago and had no problem but now I am a little spooked. Is running the defrag that high of a risk or is this an old school mentality?Eric

Why are you doing defragmentation? I wouldn't recommend it as a normal maintainance unless you have any reason like soem error in event log or high amount of white space coming in event id 1221. I believe it is just a mentality, I did many defrag and rarely got problem (however it was also due to database corruption) but I prefer mailbox moves instead of defragmentation. I would suggest you to go through below couple of similar thread to identify pros and cons of both method and decide what is best in your case... DB Size Reduction - Offline Defrag... http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvradmin/thread/75273abb-56bc-4e6f-b84c-f28aab2843fa/#3f3f20e1-5b48-4b44-b672-c51f6d887188 DB Size Reduction - Move Mailboxes.... http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvradmin/thread/e5c09707-d674-457a-bf14-7ebcfabbdf13/#b02ab9e6-65bf-4379-9afb-42a755dacd3a You need to seed the database replication copy in both cases.... Amit Tank | MVP Exchange Server | MCITP: EMA, MCSA: M | http://ExchangeShare.WordPress.com

Amit Tank - The reason we are wanting to defrag some of our databases is that there is up to 18GB of whitespace in our databases.

Hello,If you saying your database has 18GB of freespace then i guess the size of database would be more then 30 GB. I hope you understand the turnaround time for completing the eseutil /d ? it process around time is around 4-5 GB per hour, sometime little faster totally depended on your hardware and process speed and as well as the amount of diskspace.If you have already planed for the downtime then go for defrag, but moving the mailboxes would be the best idea, consider the fact that you can spilt in bounches without putting the production down.Arun Kumar | MCSE - 2K3 + Messaging | ITIL-F V3

Hello,If you saying your database has 18GB of freespace then i guess the size of database would be more then 30 GB. I hope you understand the turnaround time for completing the eseutil /d ? it process around time is around 4-5 GB per hour, sometime little faster totally depended on your hardware and process speed and as well as the amount of diskspace.If you have already planed for the downtime then go for defrag, but moving the mailboxes would be the best idea, consider the fact that you can spilt in bounches without putting the production down. Arun Kumar | MCSE - 2K3 + Messaging | ITIL-F V3 Our databases are around 90 to 110 GB. We ran a defrag last year and it only took 3 to 4 hours per DB, but now we have more DB's and they are a little larger.I am in the process of trying themailbox movemethod now...

Hello,Move-mailbox is the good option, keep updating us.Arun Kumar | MCSE - 2K3 + Messaging | ITIL-F V3

I moved all the mailboxes from DB8 to DB12 and now DB8 is completely empty. Now I am trying to get DB8 ready so I can start the process all over with mailboxes in other DB's. It was my understanding that if I took the old store (DB8) offline, delete the EDB file and brought the store back online, it will create a fresh (empty) EDB file which you can then re-seed. I didn't deleted the EDB file I renamed it to ".old" (trying to be cautious) and brought it back online and it failed. Am I missing a step?

Yes you're at the right steps... just ensure you rename that database to .old and mount the mailbox store with a blank store :)Arun Kumar | MCSE - 2K3 + Messaging | ITIL-F V3

Got it!!! Thank you very much....I was trying to bring it back online using Cluster Administrator and it kept failing. Didn't realize this has to be done in EMC. Eric

Great! keep updating status :) Arun Kumar | MCSE - 2K3 + Messaging | ITIL-F V3