In Exchange 2010, using address book policies and third party custom send connectors I have shared our Exchange resources with other related but separate organizations.

To date, I've always created separate database and log volumes for each organization, sometimes, multiple databases for large organizations. This has resulted in widely varying database sizes. I generate reports and other management tasks based on a value in CustomAttribute1 that identifies what organization an account belongs to. But, I also run some daily scripts based on the mailbox's database placement.

I'm wondering if maybe I should abandon the database for exclusive organization model and allow the mingling of accounts from all organizations into multiple databases. It would require a reworking of some of my scripts. This might help in keeping the size/user count similar between the various databases.

Is there a best practice or consensus on how to create database and log volumes for related but separate organizations in one Exchange org?

• Edited by Thunderpup 12 hours 4 minutes ago

In my opinion there is no reason to assign mailboxes to specific mailbox databases unless you treat those databases differently in some respect, such as assigning different default quotas, backing them up differently, or maintaining different numbers of copies.  As to doing it for quotas, I don't think that's such a good idea because to raise someone's quota you have to move their mailbox to a different database, which is rather cumbersome.

I would vote for abandonment of that practice.

Hi Thunderpup,

Thank you for your question.

I agree with Ed. In addition, if you all the mingling of accounts from all organization into multiple database, it will be more different to manage, for example, it will be not convenient to generate any reports and other management task.

If there are any questions regarding this issue, please be free to let me know.

Best Regard,

Jim