Exchange 2010 Hard Drive Space Issues

wirestyle22

I'm running Exchange 2010 on a Windows Server 2012 R2 server. The exchange server is consuming hard drive space very rapidly. I currently have 236 GB free of 3.41 TB. At the rate it's going we will be out of space by March.

In the EMC I checked to make sure "Enable background database maintenance (24 x 7 ESE scanning)" was checked. It runs daily from 1:00 AM to 5:00 AM.

Exchange Management Shell:

Get-MailboxDatabase -Status | ft name,databasesize,availablenewmailboxspace -auto

Get-MailboxDatabase | Get-MailboxStatistics | Sort totalitemsize -desc | ft displayname, totalitemsize, itemcount | Select –first 50

So it's definitely not the mailboxes taking up all of that space. Any ideas?

brianlittlejohn

@wirestyle22 Log files. Check that directory for the DB.

wirestyle22

@brianlittlejohn Isn't database maintenance supposed to take care of those?

brianlittlejohn

@wirestyle22 Exchange aware backup is supposed to take care of it. You may have an issue there.

wirestyle22

@brianlittlejohn Do you know of a powershell command to check this? I could be sitting here for 30 minutes waiting for it to calculate the space

brianlittlejohn

@wirestyle22 not off hand.

sully93

Just open Windows Explorer and look at your log directory. If you are not using an Exchange aware backup program then your logs are not getting purged.

momurda

@wirestyle22 said in Exchange 2010 Hard Drive Space Issues:

@brianlittlejohn Do you know of a powershell command to check this? I could be sitting here for 30 minutes waiting for it to calculate the space

If it is taking that long to calculate the logs folder space, then that is the problem. You probably have tens of thousands of little log files there and they arent being truncated daily.

wirestyle22

@momurda I'll check on it. Thanks

sully93

If a large number of logs are the problem then you can manually delete them if the database is clean.

Dismount the database
Run the command eseutil /MH "<databasename>.edb"
If the state shows the database as Clean Shutdown you are good to delete the log files.

Feel free to hit me up if you need any help on this.

wirestyle22

@sully93 Thanks

wirestyle22

This does seem to be the issue. What backup solution should we be moving to? Veeam?

momurda

What are you using now? Are yopu sure it is configured correctly for exchange?

wirestyle22

@momurda said in Exchange 2010 Hard Drive Space Issues:

What are you using now? Are yopu sure it is configured correctly for exchange?

Everything here is inherited. They used Cobian backup and Windows backup.

wirestyle22

2.27 TB in the logs $:\$

travisdh1

@wirestyle22 said in Exchange 2010 Hard Drive Space Issues:

2.27 TB in the logs $:\$

Sure sounds like backups haven't been happening on the database.

momurda

That is like 1million+ log files. Cant believe your exchange is still serving mail in a timely fashion.
Cobian Backup doesnt seem to support exchange.

sully93

Windows Backup should be able to truncate the Exchange logs.

brianlittlejohn

Windows backup is supposed to truncate logs, if it is configured correctly.

JaredBusch

@sully93 said in Exchange 2010 Hard Drive Space Issues:

If a large number of logs are the problem then you can manually delete them if the database is clean.

Dismount the database

Run the command eseutil /MH "<databasename>.edb"

If the state shows the database as Clean Shutdown you are good to delete the log files.

Feel free to hit me up if you need any help on this.

Never do this unless it is an absolute last resort. You can break shit.

I have had to do it in the past, but you seriously do not want to.