After 12 years of Exchange Experience I decided to write the 6 golden rules that you need to know to achieve a reliable exchange environment that will keep your Exchange servers running longer without unplanned downtime.
On the face of them these 6 rules sound very simple however 90% of unplanned outages occurred because of them:
- Make sure you have enough disk space on your Exchange Server – 80% of Exchange Server outages are caused by lack of free disk space, This is the easiest step to get a good up time but most admins \ Engineers fail on this point.
- Make sure your Exchange Server backup Flush the Exchange logs – If you running a DAG and your Exchange Server backup software Is not deleting the Logs from the Database you will run out of space In not time, Make sure you backup software Is clearing the logs, Simply check the number Of logs In your Exchange DB log folder and make sure It changes every day after the backup job finished.
- Make sure Content Indexing Is In healthy state – If you content Index Is not healthy you Databases will not fail over,
- Make sure you DAG replication Is working – Monitoring your DAG Is the most important task In Exchange maintenance and again 90% of DAG failures are occurred because lack of monitoring the DAG.
- Enable Exchange Message Tracking log – Without your message tracking log you can track your messages and find out why users are not receiving email and you or know how many emails a specific mailbox receive.
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Run the latest Exchange Build Number or one behind – Running the latest build number will keep your Exchange Server safe and up to date with the latest features, the longer you wait with your patching the harder it will get to get to the latest build.
Following these 6 easy steps will guarantee a stable and reliable up time for your Exchange environment.