Just anecdotally, a few years ago I had customer running Exchange and ran
into constant problems on select servers. One of the techs correlated the
problems to the load on the machine. Any Exchange server which could not
handle the burst traffic demands would end up with data corruption. The
result was a policy which any Exchange server with an average CPU (including
I/O wait) was above 30% was either upgraded or the load the split.
Tim
-----Original Message-----
From: exim-users-bounces@??? [
mailto:exim-users-bounces@exim.org] On
Behalf Of Cliff Pratt
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 8:01 PM
To: Jason Meers
Cc: exim-users@???
Subject: Re: [exim] Exchange move
On 12/20/05, Jason Meers <Jason.Meers@???> wrote:
>
> >
> > To me, this post shows a lack of understanding on how exchange works,
> and
> > more so when it comes to the point on how to handle a corrupt server.
> >
>
> Nice, but not as good as a sound argument backed by facts would have
> been though.
Like running Exchange servers for several years and not having *any* data
corruptions. Like restoring backups successfully 2 or 3 times (to alternate
machines) for mailbox retrieval after someone decided that a deleted mailbox
just *had* to be retrieved? Like testing DR situations and actually
demonstrating that they worked. (Not that I ever used them).
>
> >
> > Only if you have severe corruption, which you would avoid by actually
> taking
> > care of your data.
> >
> I actually expect this to be the job of the server. How should I take
> care of my data, should I stop people sending and receiving emails, or
> prevent people from opening their mailbox.
>
> Should I EXPECT corruption as a day-to-day part of running an exchange
> server and allocate extra resources to hunting for it? It sounds like a
> lot of EXTRA work, are you a volunteer that doesn't need paying or does
> this cost time and money?
No. You should NOT expect data corruption, as a day-to-day part of running
exchange. If you REALLY get data corruption on a daily basis running
Exchange , you need to find out WHY.
>>- Your information store could have been corrupt for weeks before
> >>crashing
> >
> >
> > Uhm, only if you have not backed up the database in that time. Let's
> > reiterate: ALL the major backup tools _will_ do a complete consistency
> check
> > when you back up. If the store is corrupt, you _will_ be told. IF you
> find a
> > corrupt tool, you have the choice of trying a soft recovery on a per
> item
> > basis. You can do a somewhat nastier thing and to a hard recovery and
> just
> > trash whatever was in that object. Or you can to a log replay and do a
> point
> > in time recovery... pretty much the same choices as on a
> > multi-million-dollar-Oracle cluster.
> >
No, it is not true that you can have corruptions and still make a successful
backup. The Exchange server (2000 and above) does an integrity check on the
databases every time a backup is done. I used to periodically check the
servers offline too, which is a stronger check, again with no problems.
Cheers,
Cliff
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