Managing Storage Settings

It is a simple fact that the user’s need for storage expands to meet the total amount of available storage plus 10%. Without management of storage demands, you will never have enough disk space. Of course, these needs are seldom thought about when the Exchange server is deployed. It is very easy to go from “we have plenty of storage” to “where did all the disk space go?” Everything from attachments to deleted item retention to bulging inboxes demands storage space. Fortunately, we can leverage Windows PowerShell to bring some sanity to the situation.

The first step in working with the storage groups is to find out how many storage groups are defined on the server and their associated names. To do this, use the Get-StorageGroup cmdlet, as shown here:

 Get-StorageGroup

When issued with no parameters, the Get-StorageGroup cmdlet returns with a listing of all the storage groups defined on the server. This output is shown here:

 Name                      Server            Replicated        Recovery ----                      ------            ----------        -------- First Storage Group       SMBEX01           None              False Second Storage Group      SMBEX01           None              False

After we have found the storage group we are interested in, we can retrieve all the information from it by using the Get-StorageGroup cmdlet to select the first storage group and pipelining the resulting object to the Format-List cmdlet. This command is shown here:

 Get-StorageGroup "first storage group" | Format-List *

Examining the Database

Although the storage groups are interesting, what most administrators think about when it comes to Exchange server is the database itself. To retrieve information about the mailbox databases on your server, use the Get-MailboxDatabase cmdlet with no arguments. This is shown here:

 Get-MailboxDatabase

The results from this command, shown here, are useful for helping us to identify the name and location of the Exchange Server mailbox database.

 Name              Server    StorageGroup         Recovery ----              ------    ------------         -------- Mailbox Database  SMBEX01   First Storage Group  False

After we have decided which mailbox database to work with, we can pipeline the object returned by the Get-MailboxDatabase cmdlet to the Format-List cmdlet. This command is shown here:

 Get-MailboxDatabase | Format-List *

This command will return all the properties associated with the mailbox database and the associated values. A sampling of the returned data is shown here:

 JournalRecipient              : MailboxRetention              : 30 days OfflineAddressBook            : OriginalDatabase              :

If, however, we are only interested in storage quota limits, we can modify the command, as shown here:

 Get-MailboxDatabase | Format-list *quota

The results of this command are nice, neat, and succinct, as shown here:

 ProhibitSendReceiveQuota : 2355MB ProhibitSendQuota        : 2GB IssueWarningQuota        : 1945MB