An Exchange mailbox database as one of the most critical email communication platform requires regular maintenance for flawless email transmission between the sender and receiver.
However, maintaining an exchange mailbox database while keeping the long-term sustainability intact is not as easy as it seems to be. Everything needs to be planned and scheduled to carry out the maintenance tasks successfully while ensuring efficient operation and smooth functioning of exchange databases.
Here are the steps to configure the maintenance schedule in an Exchange mailbox database.
Launch the Exchange Management Console and select “Mailbox” under the Organization Configuration” in the left pane.
In the database management tab, double click on that particular exchange database that needs maintenance and schedule the maintenance task for it by clicking on the “Maintenance” tab.
Next, choose the maintenance schedule from the dropdown and check the following two checkboxes –
- Enable background database maintenance (24x7 ESE scanning).
- Enable circular logging.
After you click “Ok”, a database maintenance window will be scheduled that will allow your Exchange server to execute all the important tasks at the specified time.
In case you desire to use PowerShell or want to perform the maintenance task on a batch of Exchange database simultaneously, simply run the cmdlet Set-MailboxDatabase in PowerShell. In order to find the database schedule, you can make use of the –MaintenanceSchedule field as per the following command
Set-MailboxDatabase -Identity "Exchange\MailboxDatabase" -MaintenanceSchedule "Mon.5:00-Mon.9:00"
This command will run the exchange mailbox maintenance schedule on Monday.
To further defragment the exchange database, one can use the “eseutil” tool which is inbuilt in the Exchange server and can be manually configured. However, your Exchange server may have to face a downtime of nearly 5 to 20 minutes per gig of the information store.
One needs enough storage space on the drive with the edb files in order to create a database copy via double clicking on an Information store to see the path. As an instance, let’s use a temporary directory for defragmentation of the drive as follows –
eseutil /d /ds /tc:E:\backup\eseutildefrag.edb /q
The Final Note
Keeping in mind the complex and voluminous exchange mailbox databases, it is essential to often perform defragmentation of databases, re-index them and carry out other maintenance tasks in order to execute smooth flow of communication. We hope that by following the above steps would help you to configure the maintenance schedule of an exchange database mailbox.
However, when you encounter Exchange corruption or damage in mailbox databases, you may need 3rd party EDB to PST tool that are reliable and smart enough to perform everything without any hassle. This is an efficient recovery solution to resolve all the Exchange Server issues and escape potential errors via complete exchange database restoration.
