Running Exchange 2010 across two servers in a DAG. A couple of my databases have a large amount of whitespace that I'd like to reclaim. I've seen recommendations for both offline defrag and moving mailboxes to a new database. The latter seems to be the preferred method. Yet, I can't seem to find any instructions aside from "Move your mailboxes to a new database and delete the old one." Are there special circumstances for creating/removing databases in a DAG, or will the EMC take care of any high availability issues? Do I need to manually remove any .edb files? Or will the EMC remove the database and all its copies from both servers?

Hi Yes moving mailboxes is the recommended way to do this. You will need to create a new database on one of your DAG nodes and then create a database copy, move all the mailboxes to it from the database you are clearing out. You will need to delete the .EDB files yourself. You can use this command to move all mailboxes from one database to another: Get-Mailbox -Database <OldDB> | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase <NewDB> Steve

That seems simple and straight forward enough. Thanks for the quick reply! I'll give that shot this weekend and let you know the result. Is there any issues doing this with Legacy, Linked or Discovery mailboxes? One of my databases (not the one I'm concerned about today), has these types of mailboxes. If I do this procedure on that database, are there other considerations?

Discovery mailboxes are fine to move, as are linked ones. You shouldn't have any legacy mailboxes in a 2010 database though? If this was your first mailbox database then it may still contain the arbitration mailbox(es), you can do a Get-Mailbox -Arbitration to find out where they are.

I have 7 legacy mailboxes. They may be old and not in use; I'll have to check. This is in fact my first database, and the command you stated shows they are on my 1st server, EX1: Name Alias ServerName ProhibitSendQuota ---- ----- ---------- ----------------- SystemMailbox{1f05a927... SystemMailbox{1f0... ex1 unlimited SystemMailbox{e0dc1c29... SystemMailbox{e0d... ex1 unlimited FederatedEmail.4c1f4d8... FederatedEmail.4c... ex1 1 MB (1,048,576 bytes) What would need to be done with these?

You need to move those mailboxes to your new database too. Exchange will not let you delete the database until they are moved.

You need to move those mailboxes to your new database too. Exchange will not let you delete the database until they are moved.

Any special method for doing this since they are special mailboxes? Or will the normal mailbox move take care of it?

Normal move is fine. Get-Mailbox -Arbitration | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase <dbname>

Great! Thanks for your help!

No worries.

Recently we migrated from Ex2K3 to Ex2K10. Mailbox move went smooth without any issues. As regard to public folders move, there was only 24GB of data but when moved to Ex2K10 the size ballooned to 105GB. Do you think the size difference is the so called 'whitespace' and if so, can I create a new public folder database like you have suggested for Mailboxes and move the public folders one at a time oblivious to the users?

Hi That sounds like something has gone wrong with your replication, there may be white space in your public folder database but that wouldn't have caused this problem. You should open a new question and include some more information about your environment. Cheers, Steve

Thanks, Steve.