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Winter 2008 Exchange Email Maintenance Schedule

This is estimated schedule and is subject to change. Please check back periodically for changes.

There will be no access to your email while your database is down. No mail will bounce. It will be delivered when your email database comes back online.


WEEK 1: Database Defragmentation

The email outages for 12/22 through 12/26 are expected to last between 5 and 20 hours depending on the size of the database. These are estimates based on our testing. For the most part each Exchange email database is dedicated to all userids beginning with a certain letter. Examples: All userids that begin with letter 'A', 'F', 'L', and 'T' will be down on 12/22. There are some minor exceptions where some mailboxes have been moved to databases not matching the first letter of their userid. If you find your email is down on a day where your letter is not listed you can send an email to mail-admin (from a non-SLAC account, of course) to ask for the status of your mailbox.

WEEK 2: Database Repair
We would also like to take down 5 databases to run a process to repair "soft" corruption in these databases. "Soft" corruption is minor corruption which allows the database to continue to run and it can be backed up successfully. However, having any corruption in a database is not a good thing and we'd like to repair it if we have the time.
 
Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
12/21

No maintenance work scheduled
12/22

A, F, L and T defrag done.
12/23

C, J and S defrag done.

12/24

E, G, N and O defrag done.


12/25

B, K, P, Q and U-Z defrag done.


12/26

D, H, I, M and R defrag done.  
12/27

No maintenance work scheduled
12/28

No maintenance work scheduled
12/29

P, Q repair done.

12/30

D, M and S repair done.
12/31

J, L and R repair done.
1/1

No maintenance work scheduled
1/2

No maintenance work scheduled
1/3

No maintenance work scheduled

Why Are We Doing This? To improve the performance of our Exchange servers
 
Over the years our Exchange databases have become increasing large and fragmented. Our work will defragment the databases and will shrink them by 10-20%. Microsoft has recommended we perform these actions and we strongly agree. The work we do now will also benefit us when it comes time to move all this email to new Exchange 2007 servers in 2009. It will make the move process run faster.

You can help reduce the length of maintenance outages by reducing the size of your mailbox.

  Last Updated: 07/22/2010
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