Hi Guys, I am hoping to see if anyone can quickly give advice/tips on what and how I should go about doing an offline defragmentation of my Exchange 2003 Database? I have never done it before and am a little scared...After all, email is extremely important and I don't want to have any possibility of screwing it up. Are there good visual links that show you how to do this? And if anyone has ever done it, please do give me step by step instructions on how and what switches to use? I know I have to use the eseutil.exe tool located here --> C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin So when I go to the cmd prompt I have to go to that directory,and type this "Run eseutil /d <database name.edb>" Or do I have to also point it to the database.edb location also? Is that the correct way of doing the offlline defrag of the Exchange Database? Thanks! Sport

Hi, Any reason why you want to run offline defrag. This is not recommended to run unless there is lots of space to gain. Look for event 1221 in the application log for how much white space there is in the database. If you really must perform the operation this article explains what to do: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;192185 Leif

Hi, Thanks for answering, but why is it a bad idea? I am at about 35Gigs of data on the Priv.edb I have also moved alot of user emails (who have like 30,000 emails/user)to pst files so that I could get some more white spaces... So why is this a bad idea to do an offline defragmentation? Wouldn't it speed up the over all database performance bycleaning and organizing things up??? I would really like to hear the reasoning of why it is a bad idea? Sport

Exchange runs online maintenance each night (by default, unless you've disabled it). This optimises and reorganises the internal structure of the database. One of the effects of doing this is that any whitespace is then made contiguous and Exchange will then re-use this space before expanding the size of the database again. Re-using whitespace is less expensive in performance terms that expanding the size of the database. Therefore, there really is no need to run an offline defragmentation unless you have plenty of whitespace to gain (and I mean in excess of 30%). Check your 1221 event log as Leif said and this will give you an idea of the amount of space you'd gain. But as I said earlier, the first thing that will then need to happen as new emails are sent is that the size of the database will be expanded again! Running eseutil simply adds more risk to you and also incurs downtime for the system. What if the machine rebooted, suffered a power cut, blue-screened, etc,etc, during the eseutil process? Why take the risk if you don't need to? That's all everyone is saying. You really don't *need* to do it. Exchange is designed to run 24x7 and many large organisations demand this - you won't find them running eseutil every weekend.

Hi Neil, Again thanks for the information! I've had my Exchange 2003 up and running since our migration over from Exchange 2000 about 2 years ago. We've grown from about ~15Gigs to now ~35Gigs of data on the Priv.edb. Is two years without an offlinedefragmentation too long? Has anyone ever just left their Exchange 2003 running for 5+ years without doing so? Thanks for your help. I've looked at the event ID 1221 and it says that "The database "First Storage Group\Mailbox Store (ServerName)" has 3 megabytes of free space after online defragmentation has terminated." So should I not do it then because it only has 3 megabytes of free space of the online defragmentation?

Hi, As Neil wrote there is absolutely no need to run this defragmentation since you don't gain disk space by doing it - andgaining disk space isthe only reason to ever run the offline version. Leif

Hi, I will recommend you Neil and Leif's suggestion, if you have big size of white space, you can also perform below method to clean the white space: Dinesh S. Create a new storage group and move all users on new storage group one by one. Again you can move user from new storage group to old storage group. This processor will clean complete white space of your database, please do this activity off business hours only.

Hi, I will recommend you Neil and Leif's suggestion, if you have big size of white space, you can also perform below method to clean the white space: Create a new storage group and move all users on new storage group one by one. Again you can move user from new storage group to old storage group. This processor will clean complete white space of your database, please do this activity off business hours only. Dinesh S.