defragmentation of exchange server
does performing a defragmentation to the system partition and log partition of mailbox exchange 2010 server after working hour affect the mailbox server in other words defragmentation to the log partition won't affect the databse of mailbox defragmentation of system partition will affect the mailbox server performance also does defragmentation of system partition will affect the hubcas0 database queue
March 25th, 2012 3:44am

Hi, The article below is described the opinion of the Exchange Team about the file-level defragmentation of database drives. Please, see it, hope it will helpful. Do we need to file-level defragment Exchange database drives?MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010 | MCSA
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March 25th, 2012 4:11am

Hi, The article below is described the opinion of the Exchange Team about the file-level defragmentation of the database drives. Please, see it, hope it will helpful. Do we need to file-level defragment Exchange database drives? MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010 | MCSA
March 25th, 2012 11:04am

Defragmentation is generally not worth it on Exchange. If you're using Exchange 2007 or 2010 and not relying on Exchange 2010 Database Copies and the Lag, then you are also backing up with snapshots. In addition to the added performance hit of moving blocks around, defragmentation will inflate the size of your your snapshots. If you deploy using Thin Provisioned storage, you'll see your actual space consumed bloat with defragmentation as well. If you are worried about the impact of fragmentation in your Exchange environment, I'd recommend that you check and see what your fragmentation actually is. One way to do this is schedule an analysis only of the built in defragmenter tool against your database LUNs. Another way is to use a tool that gets the retrieval pointers for a file and then provides some statistics about the returned informantion. I recently worked on such a thing, a Get-NaHostFileFragmentationStatistics cmdlet that will be included in the Data ONTAP PowerShell Toolkit in the near future. Very likey, if you followed MS layout best practices you will find that you don't have an issue. In a recent internal IT department check of all databases in messaging environment of the company I work for (A mix of Exchange 2003, 2007, and 2010 as we are in the process of migrating) revealed that no database LUN has more than 18 fragments. Some of the databases have been in continuous operation for over 7 years. Still it is within the realm of possiblility, although a minute chance, that someone out there somewhere has a highly fragmented database. When you mix poor layout practices with the behavior of database replicas in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 pre-SP1, http://blogs.technet.com/b/mikelag/archive/2011/02/09/how-fragmentation-on-incorrectly-formatted-ntfs-volumes-affects-exchange.aspx , it could in theory happen. Even if you were the .0001% and experienced the issue with File Attribute Length that Mike notes in his article, Defragmentation is STILL NOT RECOMMENDED. In fact, because a defragmenter is moving blocks around and updating FAL in the process, it actually only makes the problem worse. So, if you are unlucky enough to find yourself faced with such an issue, what do you? The only remediation offered is: "The only way to remove the attribute list for this file is to completely copy the file off to another drive, delete the original copy and then copy the copied file back to the original location. When this is done, the file is written to the disk contiguously leaving literally no fragments in the file. Life is good once again." Oh my, now that sounds painful. Now if your storage just happens to be NetApp, it's actually not painful at all. By leveraging Sub-LUN cloning technology, you can script the process of: 1. suspend the DB replication. 2. Sub-LUN clone the problem DB replica to a temp thin LUN in the same NetApp volume (consumes no space on the storage controller) 3. Delete the original file. 4. Sub-LUN clone back from the temp location to the original. 5. Clean up the temp 6. Resume replication. I oriinally create the sub-LUN cloning cmdlet in the Data ONTAP Powershell toolkit to support rapid provisioning in cloud environments. The reality is that is can be used to clone any file, creating a new NTFS structure and allocation, but behind the scenes remapping the same blocks on the storage and increasing reference counts. The sub-LUN cloning cmdlet is the aptly named Copy-NaHostFile. It's very fast. You can clone a 1TB file in just a couple of minutes. Here an older article with a link to a demo of using sub-lun cloning to rapidly provision VMs: https://communities.netapp.com/community/netapp-blogs/msenviro/blog/2011/05/18/live-from-teched-rapid-provisioning-and-csvs J
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March 25th, 2012 9:09pm

thanks for your kind support ,I just have warning in the scom that my fragmentation level is to high for the following servers domain controller,2 clustered mailbox server with exchange 2010 service pack 1 , 2 network load balanced hub cas server with exchange 2010 service pack 1 these servers are on virtual machine on vmware . the type of storage is sun storage 7410 I don't have access to this storage ,let me post my question again I got the following warnings on scom logical disk fragmentation level is high these warning for the system hard disk of all the servers listed above also for the logs hardisk of mailbox server not the mailbox database hard disk NOTE: the mailbox database logs are in hard disk differ than the hard disk used for the mailbox database also I'm using Data protection manager for backing up my exchange server . all I need to know can I do fraagmentaion with windows defragmentation tool after business hour or not
March 26th, 2012 8:46am

thanks Andrey. but I didn't mean to do defragmentation on mailbox database I meant system hard disk and Database logs hard disk
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March 26th, 2012 8:50am

Hi Om, Here has written about the log hard disk defragmentation, and also I suppose there will not any problems if you try to defrag the system disk, if only with OS's performance but not the fact it will.MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010 | MCSA
March 26th, 2012 10:08am

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