When Did You Last Defragment Your Exchange 2003 Server

Bet you don’t recall when you last defragmented your Exchange 2003 server. For those organizations with full time IT staff, this should be a task on their to do list, but how many small businesses, particularly those using the SBS variants are likely to do it regularly, if at all.

This is a straightforward task which can and likely will save you gigabytes of hard drive space, and the bigger the organization, the more space you’re likely to save.

Whilst not difficult, it does involve the command line and for this reason I believe most small business owners who “look after” their own servers, wouldn’t even realize it needs doing, let alone how

I spoke to one client recently who thought defragging exchange server 2003, was the same as the “disk defragment” graphical tool that we are all aware of. Why would he believe anything different.
Here is a brief run down of the process assuming you have a default installation.

1. Backup your exchange data
2. Verify your backup
3. Open Exchange System Manager
4. Using Exchange System Manager drill down to Servers / YourServerName / First Storage Group
5. Right click Mailbox Store (YourServerName)
6. Click Dismount Store
7. Right click Public Folder Store (YourServerName)
8. Click Dismount Store
9. Leave the Exchange System Manager open, we will come back to that later
10. Click Start / Run / Type cmd then press enter or click ok
11. Type cd\program files\exchsrvr\bin then press enter
12. Type eseutil /d “c:\program files\exchsrvr\mdbdata\pub1.edb” then press enter
13. The system will now begin defragging the public folder store. It will take a few minutes to complete.
14. Once completed, type eseutil /d “c:\program files\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.edb” then press enter
15. The system will now begin defragging the mailbox store. This should take considerably longer to complete than the public store. Be patient here.
16. Once completed, type exit then press enter. The command prompt now disappears.
17. Now, click back to our window containing the Exchange System Manager
18. Right click Public Folder Store (YourServerName)
19. Click Mount Store
20. Right click Mailbox Store (YourServerName)
21. Click Mount Store
22. Close the Exchange System Manager

All complete. May sound like a lot of steps, but really quite straightforward and worthwhile.