EV implementation and mailbox size.

[Jayman]

Hello,

We just had a consulting company install EV 6 and migrate a few mailboxes. The new mailbox size in exchange 2003 has increased. Did some calculating and the size is equal to sizes of the imported PSTs and the mailbox itself. This is confusing as I am under the impression that this will reduce the size of the exchange information store database.

Is there a step that the consultant missed.

Jay

[Maynard_K]

Size of priv won't decrease immediately.  Perhaps and offline defrag may give some desired results.

[Jayman]

Thank you for the reply Maynard K but the off line defrag is not to be taken lightly. I have about 85 GB of PSTs to migrate and if this is the only way then this makes it a very scary situation.

Jay

[Maynard_K]

Have a look at your "vault store" properties.  You will see an option titled "safety copy removal".  Is this configured for "after backup"?

[Jayman]

Again I thank you for a quick reply. I will look at this tomorrow morning and will post.

Jay

[Maynard_K]

So, if your "safety copy" removal strategy has been configured for "after backup", then the only thing required is that you run a backup against your "storage partition" and EV will then remove the items from Exchange and the size of the priv should then decrease?  If you take a look at a user's mailbox that has had an archival, do the archived items display the "pending icon"?  If none of the above are true, then you may want to investigate your method for determining what to archive, IE your policy, as well as the content that is left behind in user shortcuts.  Just a few things to check on.

[MichelZ]

Maynard

I don't see your point here.
The customer refers to "PST Migration" as far as I can see.
A PST Migration should not affect mailbox size (or at least not very much).
In a "good" PST Migration Scenario, the Data of the PST File is written directly to the archive, and only a shortcut gets placed in the User's Mailbox.

However, there is an option to migrate PST Files first to the Mailbox (which doesn't really make sense in most cases).

Jay, could you confirm that you don't want to migrate PST Files into the Mailbox first?

Cheers
Michel

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

posted in the other thread, but am posting here for completeness of the thead.

What is the Shortcut Content?  If it is full message body the only space saving will be from attachements.

I would recommend an Customized content that leaves the first 100 characters.  You will need to test this your self to see what works best for you and your company.

Additionally for PST migration you might consider to not shortcut items over a certain age, do you really need a shortcut that is 7 years old?  :)

Check out the PST Migration Policy Properties: Shortcut Content and the PST Migration Policy Properties: Shortcut Creation in the Administrators_Guide.chm file.

Cheers,

[Jayman]

Thank you Maynard K, MichelZ and Tony Sterling for looking over this (my) post. I have to learn the ropes with this software first.  As far as the short cuts go I will check the setting. Our situation is unique in the sense that  almost all the PSTs are stored on a Netware Server, few have them in their local c:\documents and settings folder, and many of have multiple PSTs.  I xcopied the ones stored on the Netware box to a Windows 2003 share because the EV could not access them on the Novell Server.  I did ask a power user to check and play with his imported PSTs (archives) to copy the various archives from one to another (so there will be just one imported PST and the sense of an unlimited mailbox). In the meatime I checked my own mailbox and as previously stated the size reported was the size of the mailbox plus the size of the imported PSTs. I did vault 2 months of mail and the mailbox sized did decrease.

As far as the shortcut goes I will propose that we limit the text displayed, right now if you look at it in the preview pane you will only see a few lines and double clicking will open the entire mail item.

What I need is way to import the PSTs without putting it in the mailbox but I think that is what happened because the Consultant did as me to remove the mailbox quotas which I did.

Thanks.

Jay