Any Exchange Admins out there?

[ZLTFUL]

OK, first off, I am NOT an Exchange admin. This portion of the job was dumped into my lap and I have been able to manage thus far.



Our Exchange server is critically low on storage space. As it is the standard as opposed to enterprise, I can only have one mailbox store. Otherwise, I would simply divide our mailbox store between the current directory and another hard drive on the server that is empty (small but empty).



We have run mailbox maintenance having it delete EVERYTHING 90 days or older for everyone in the organization. And the mailbox sizes have decreased tremendously. But the logs and database still remain the same size.



How can I run a cleanup to delete the deleted items within the DB?



When I first took over this part of my position, I warned that this exchange server that was purchased for an organization with 50 email accounts 5 years ago would not be able to support an organization that now has 250 email accounts spread across 3 locations with 50% of them being allowed maximum mailbox sizes.



The owners now realize that we do need a new exchange server but want us to bandaid the problem for a couple of months. The problem is, everything I have done to free up space (disk cleanup, purge deleted mailboxes, purge deleted mail items, instruct users on the use of personal folders stored locally, etc) has only had a minimal effect as the database size remains the same.



Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Stangman]

I'm not an exchange admin, although I have been in the past.

What version are you running? (complete version number with service pack number)

You can also free up a few GB by adding a second hard drive and changing your swap file settings so it resides on that second drive only.

The store size will not change until after the deleted items retention period (I think its 30 days by default).

Look for other things to get rid of on the drive (old zip files, larger files, etc) or if you feel up to it Ghost or use TrueImage to clone the drive to a larger one.

[derby]

you need to do an offline defrag to regain your space.

[ZLTFUL]

you need to do an offline defrag to regain your space.

Done and gined about 40% of our space back. We also changed the retention period to 7 days from the 90 days the former admin had set it to.

[derby]

Done and gined about 40% of our space back. We also changed the retention period to 7 days from the 90 days the former admin had set it to.