> My questions are: > > * What specific quota sizes should I put in place? From what I've > read Microsoft recommends the .ost does not exceed 2gb and inboxes > to not exceed 5,000 items. Should I use this as the quotas we put in > place or should I enforce something less than that even? >
When faced with this problem in a former life (not exchange) I: - Determined what a probable quota would be based on the size of available storage. So if I had 1TB and 200 users, that leaves approx 5Gb/mailbox. - Guesstimated the number of users we would see in the next few years, and determined how much space I would need to have the quotas in step 1. - Generated the following stats: largest mailbox, smallest mailbox, median, and averages within the high and low ranges. Also how much mail storage I consumed per day. Once you look at the stats, you will see a pattern of usage, and may be able to fuzzy logic your quota size vs hardware needed. (I don't remember all of the numbers I generated, but I remember that 20% of our ~5k users were consuming 50% of the total space). - Took all of those numbers and created a plan of options for management. It included the costs of hardware we would need to purchase to achieve each option. > * How do I handle backlash from the worst offenders who are likely to > gripe the loudest when this is put in place? Obviously I'll have > instructions in place for everybody on how to archive their emails > to .psts which they can then back up on the network, but what else > should we plan to do? > Not sure how hard this would be to do for you, but when implementing quotas, we would set it on all new accounts and those at least 10% under quota. For the rest we set a quota about 10% above their current usage and gave a grace period of a few weeks to clean up. After the grace period everyone was set to same quota. Management had to be involved and agreed upon the plan before we could do this. People complained, but nothing more than usual. > Any additional guidance or recommendations would be greatly > appreciated. > I don't know what options Exchange has but I bet somewhere (maybe 3rd party?) there is an option to have older emails offloaded to some other storage but still accessible. If the older emails disappear for an afternoon, it wouldn't be the end of the world. If implemented correctly you only need to worry about your secondary storage growing over time and may be able to play more tricks with it. Look at all of the costs associated with *not* having quotas, and present this to management. For example, can you backup all of this data? How long does it take to backup? How does it affect other things? What happens when the disk gets corrupted on the mail server, how long will it take just to do a file system check during reboot? How much work is involved in adding storage for the second or third time? Damion > -Evan > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System > Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
