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February 29th, 2008 08:00

How many journaling mailboxes should I have in Exchange 2003?

Hello,

We have an Exchange 2003 Server (Enterprise) with 4 Storage Groups and between 4-5 Mail Stores in each group. What we've done so far is to have one journaling mailbox per Storage Group and have all messages from each Storage Group's Mail Stores goto a single mailbox.

We are noticing the same message in more than one journaling mailbox when users send to distro lists. While we understand this behavior is part of the the design of Message Jouranling, we'd like to eliminate the creation of additonal messages. Our thoughts are to have all mailstores journal to one mailbox.

Does anyone have any feedback on this setup? Can anyone see an impact to EmailXtender? We generated about 500 messages per hour on this server.

Thanks.

45 Posts

February 29th, 2008 11:00

That exacly how I configure things with remote sites. Even if they have a large amount of users the journal mailboxes are always local to the EX box. I've done sites that have 10k+ users on the remote servers and it was originally setup where EX was pulling mail from the remote journal mailbox and it couldn't keep up. by the time I got out there the journal mailbox had over 400,000 messages in it. We moved that journal mailbox to an Exchange server local to the EX box and all the performances issues went away.

I always thought that when the message came into the front end or the bridgehead that Exchange forwarded that message to the journal mailbox right from there rather than pass it to the remote Exchange server and then back. But I haven't done anything to prove it.

20 Posts

February 29th, 2008 08:00

If you planning to store it on a single mailbox. Please make sure the mailbox is hosted on proper lun to meet the additional IOPS requirement.

If the disk is not fast enough, it might queue up.

Personally, it is easier to manage with single journal mailbox compared to multiple.

You can configure a policy to enable journaling for every storage group to point the journal mailbox.

3 Posts

February 29th, 2008 09:00

Thanks. That is good info.

Since you bring up other sites, we have 4 other Exchange Servers in other sites with much fewer users than the one I'm currently talking about. Another idea we've kicked around is to have the other remote Exchange Servers journal to our mail server that is closest to EmailXtender. This way SMTP is doing the work of getting the message across the WAN and not MAPI.

Any thoughts there?

3 Posts

February 29th, 2008 09:00

We seem to have enough IOPS on the disk for the single journaling mailbox.

Is there a maximum rate of volume that EmailXtender can handle when scraping the mailbox?

Does anyone run a large environment this way or have any experiences one way or another?

45 Posts

February 29th, 2008 09:00

At 500 messages an hour you should be plenty safe to just use one journal mailbox. It is more common for the installs that I do to have a company use one mailbox for journaling when their enviornments are as small as yours.

I've had other customers with 4+ Exchange servers and over 50k users. In those instances we actually create an Exchange server JUST for the journal mailboxes. In those high volume environments it does seem to help to at least give each server its own journal mailbox.

Just leave all the journal mailboxes in EX while you change the mailbox on the storage groups then you can remove the connection mailboxes later once you're sure that all the mail has been processed.
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