Exchange 2010 : DB size increasing

[CapnPugwash]

We have been running Exchange 2010 on a Windows Server 2008r2 VM for a few years without any issues.

 

Recently, we had a problem with sending / receiving external emails. The problem was due to a lack of space on the disk that the Exchange DB sits on. I increased the disk size by 20GB and all was well again.

 

Since then I've noticed that the disk space is being eaten up at a rate of 1GB a day. I've ran various powershell commands to look at incoming /outgoing mail and I can't see anything untoward...

 

Advice / suggestions welcome!

[win]

You could enforce mailbox quotas and reduce max attachment sizes. Also inform people that they need to right click the bin and then 'empty'.

[CapnPugwash]

Good suggestions but I don't think any of them will resolve the issue. We already do most of these and have a policy that empties a users deleted items folder after a period of time.

 

Running a powershell script that produces a CSV file showing all mailboxes and their size, I can see that mailboxes are unlikely to be the issue... if it's not the mailboxes then, at a guess, it's the logs.

 

Like I say - Advice / suggestions welcome!

[jamesreedersmith]

Is it the log files - what backup are you running against exchange - is it one that will trncate the logs?

[pantscat]

Can you identify which file(s) are growing?

[Sagima]

I think that when the databases run out of space and then get given some that they grow slowly until exchange thinks there is enough free space inside them for day to day mailbox expansion. After that they get occasional increases as and when the database is filled up by the mailboxes that live in it.

Only based on my own observations of exchange 2010 on the two occasions that I ran out of space using it as opposed to anything I can point to on the internet.

[Max_Power]

If it was the log files wouldn't you would see them on the disk itself?

 

Exchange Databases can grow considerably each day, even when users delete something the database usually (depending on config of your exchange) wont reduce the size of the database, the deletion just turns the space into white space within the DB. the following command will tell you the size of the database with the amount of white space used. Maybe worth checking that?

Get-MailboxDatabase -Status | Sort-Object DatabaseSize -Descending | Format-Table Name, DatabaseSize, AvailableNewMailboxSpace

 

You could look at how much space is being taken up by your recoverable items folders too and possibly have a clean out depending on what your retention policy is within exchange config?

 

Get-MailBox -database "database name" -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxStatistics | select DisplayName,TotalDeletedItemSize | Sort TotalDeletedItemSize -Descending | export-csv c:\recoveritmesreport.csv

[CapnPugwash]

Is it the log files - what backup are you running against exchange - is it one that will trncate the logs?

 

Unsure. It's a VM & was set up before I started. I'll dig in and see.

 

Can you identify which file(s) are growing?

 

Using TreeSize I can see that yesterday the size of the Mailbox Database was 280.5GB, today it is 282.7 - this increase is in the folder that contains the log files. I'm not super Exchange savvy so I may be mis-understanding something, but that's what I'm seeing.

 

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At the current rate of expansion I will have to increase the disk size again before the end of the week otherwise I'll have problems with external mail again... obviously I cant do this too often!!!

 

Thanks for all your comments

[CapnPugwash]

Is it the log files - what backup are you running against exchange - is it one that will trncate the logs?

 

I *think* the only backup is through Veeam... This may be a complete shot in the dark but we recently upgraded to Veeam 7.0.... could it be connected? Like I say, I'm not Exchange savvy so feel free to correct me!

[smarties11]

I've never used Veeam; but if this was Backup Exec, you would need to ensure that you had the Microsoft Exchange agent enabled and that you were doing GRT backups on exchange. With this setup, once BE has taken a snapshot of the exchange VM it then uses the backup exec agent to process the metadata for the exchange database, and then truncates the logs. If you look in your log folder and you have logs going back days, then this is the problem. Logs should be cleared down by the backup software after each backup.

[CapnPugwash]

Ah... looking at Veeam I can see that I didn't have the 'Enable-Application aware image processing' box checked for Exchange (the logs are set to truncate upon successful backup) - I'll re-run the backups and see if this resolves the issue.

[CapnPugwash]

Wow. Backup of the Exchange server completed and the size of the DB dropped from 280GB to 210GB!

 

Job done. Thanks everyone.

[visioN]

Also in cmd prompt "vssadmin list shadows" - can hide some larger files!