Hi there,
In working with Exchange 2010, we have a difficult time monitoring the actual "used size" of a mailbox database. In short, the problem is: when a drive fills up, everything stops.
Exchange mailbox databases never decrease in size, even when mailboxes are cleaned up or moved off of a drive; therefore, if the mdb has grown to 95% of actual drive capacity but has since reduced, Windows still shows the disk as being 95% full. This means that SNMP monitoring doesn't work very well, because it can't get the available whitespace reading that you get when running a PowerShell command.
While we have moved and distributed one large (and full) mdb across three others, given the new ones 30% overhead for growth, we foresee the same thing happening again as time goes on and mailbox sizes increase. It doesn't seem to make sense that the standard way to deal with this is to continue to build new mdbs using new storage to continuously migrate mailboxes.
Is there any way other than SCOM to monitor mdb whitespace? What do others do to manage this situation? There has to be a better way than juggling mdbs as they fill up.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Regards,
Kim