Exchange Server 2010 : Prioritizing and Scheduling Maintenance Best Practices

This section focuses on tasks that should be performed regularly—on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly schedule. Besides ensuring optimum health for an organization, following these best practices will have the additional benefit of ensuring that administrators are well informed about the status of their messaging environment.

Daily Maintenance

Daily maintenance routines require the most frequent attention of an Exchange Server administrator. However, these tasks should not take a significant amount of time to perform.

Verify the Online Backup

One of the key differences between disaster and disaster recovery is the ability for an organization to resort to backups of their environment if the need arises. Considering the potential impact to an environment if the data backed up is not recoverable, it is amazing to see how often backup processes are ignored. Many organizations implement a “set it and forget it” attitude, often relying on nontechnical administrative personnel to simply “swap tapes” on a daily basis.

Whatever method is used to back up an Exchange Server environment, daily confirmation of the success of the task should be mandatory. Although the actual verification process will vary based on the backup solution being utilized, the general concept remains the same. Review the backup program’s log file to determine whether the backup has successfully completed. If there are errors reported or the backup job set does not complete successfully, identify the cause of the error and take the appropriate action to resolve the problem.

Some best practices to keep in mind when backing up an Exchange Server environment are as follows:

• Include System State data to protect against system failure.

• Keep note of how long the backup process is taking to complete. This time should match any service level agreements that might be in place.

• Determine the start and finish times of the backup process. Attempt to configure the environment so that the backup process completes before the nightly maintenance schedule begins.

• Verify that transaction logs are successfully truncated upon completion of the backup.

Check Free Disk Space

All volumes that Exchange Server 2010 resides on (Exchange Server system files, databases, transaction logs, and so forth) should be checked on a daily basis to ensure that ample free space is available. If the volume or partition runs out of disk space, no more information can be written to the disk, which causes Exchange Server to stop the Exchange Server services. This can also result in lost data and the corruption of messaging databases.

Although it is possible to perform this process manually, it is easily overlooked when “hot” issues arise. As a best practice, administrators can utilize System Center Operations Manager 2007 (OpsMgr) or a third-party product to alert administrators if free space dips below a certain threshold.

For organizations without the resources to implement such products, the process can be accomplished utilizing scripting technologies, with an email or network alert being generated when the free space falls below the designated threshold.

Review Message Queues

Message queues should be checked daily to ensure that the mail flow in the organization is not experiencing difficulties. The Queue Viewer in the Exchange Management Console toolbox can be accomplished for this task.

If messages are found stuck in the queue, administrators can utilize the Message Tracking and Mail Flow Troubleshooter to determine the cause.

Check Event Viewer Logs

On Exchange Server 2010 servers, the application log within the Event Viewer should be reviewed daily for any Warning or Error level messages. Although some error messages might lead directly to a problem on the server, some might be symptomatic of other issues in the environment. Either way, it is best to evaluate and resolve these errors as soon as possible.

Filtering for these event types can assist with determining if any have occurred within the last 24 hours.

Alternatively, if a systems or operational management solution (such as System Center Operations Manager 2007) is utilized, this process can be automated, with email or network notifications sent as soon as the error is generated.

Weekly Maintenance

Tasks that do not require daily administrative input, but that still require frequent attention, are categorized as weekly maintenance routines. Recommended weekly maintenance routines are described in the following sections.

Document Database File Sizes

In an environment without mailbox storage limitations, the size of the mailbox databases can quickly become overwhelmingly large. If the volume housing the databases is not large enough to accommodate the database growth beyond a certain capacity, services can stop, databases can get corrupted, performance can get sluggish, or the system can halt.

Even with mailbox size limitations implemented, administrators should be aware of and document the size of databases so that they can determine the estimated growth rate.

By documenting the size of all mailbox databases on a weekly basis, administrators can have a more thorough understanding of the system usage and capacity requirements in their environment.

Verify Public Folders Replication

Many environments rely on public folders to share information, and the public folder configurations can vary widely from environment to environment.

With environments that replicate public folder information among different Exchange Server servers, administrators should inspect the replication to ensure all folders are kept up to date.

There are several ways to perform quick tests to determine if a public folder is replicating properly. Among these are manual testing and reviewing the Ex00yymmdd.log and Ex01yymmdd.log files. If problems exist, administrators can use these logs to troubleshoot.

Verify Online Maintenance Tasks

Exchange Server 2010 records information in the application log about scheduled online maintenance processes. Check this event log to verify that all the online maintenance tasks are being performed and that no problems are occurring.

Using the filtering capabilities of the Event Viewer (View, Filter), administrators can apply a filter to search for specific events, and can specify a date (and time) range to search for these events. For example, it is easy to filter the events to view all events with an ID of 1206 that have occurred in the past week.

Alternatively, in the right pane of the Event Viewer, click on the Event column to sort events by their ID number; however, this view is more challenging to read because you must then verify the dates of the events as well.

The following Event IDs should be regularly reviewed:

• Event ID 1206 and 1207— These IDs give information about the start and stop times for the cleanup of items past the retention date in Item Recovery.

• Event ID 700 and 701— These IDs indicate the start and stop times of the online database defragmentation process. Administrators should ensure that the process does not conflict with Exchange Server database backups and make sure that the process completed without interruptions.

• Event IDs 9531–9535— These IDs indicate the start and end times of the cleanup of deleted mailboxes that are past the retention date.

Analyze Resource Utilization

To keep any environment healthy, overall system and network performance should be regularly evaluated. An Exchange Server 2010 environment is no exception.

At a minimum, administrators should monitor system resources at least once a week. Primary areas to focus on include the four common contributors to bottlenecks: memory, processor, disk subsystem, and network subsystem.

Ideally, utilizing a monitoring utility such as Microsoft OpsMgr 2007 to gather performance data at regular intervals is recommended because this data can be utilized to discover positive and negative trends in the environment.

Check Offline Address Book Generation

An Offline Address Book (OAB) is used by Outlook to provide offline access to directory information from the Global Address List (GAL) when users are working offline or in Cached Exchange mode. When a user starts Outlook in Cached Exchange mode for the first time, the user’s Exchange Server mailbox is synchronized to a local file (an .ost file) and the offline address list from the Exchange server is synchronized to a collection of files (.oab files) on the user’s computer.

By default, the OAB is updated daily at 5:00 a.m. if there are changes. Administrators can use the Exchange Management Console to determine the last time it was updated to ensure remote users have a valid copy to update from. To do so, follow these steps:

Monthly Maintenance

Recommended monthly maintenance practices for Exchange Server 2010 do not require the frequency of daily or weekly tasks, but they are, nonetheless, important to maintaining the overall health of the environment. Some general monthly maintenance tasks can be quickly summarized; others are explained in more detail in the following sections.

General tasks include the following:

• Perform a reboot on the Exchange Server 2010 servers to free up memory resources and kick-start online maintenance routines. This procedure can usually coincide with the implementation of any necessary hotfixes and/or service packs.

• Install approved and tested service packs and updates.

• Schedule and perform, as necessary, any major server configuration changes, including hardware upgrades.

Run the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer

Administrators should run the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) in their environments on a regular basis to determine if there are any configurations or settings that are not in line with Microsoft recommended best practices. This utility and its configuration files are updated often with new and improved settings, and available updates are installed every time the utility is run.

Administrators should perform a health check, permissions check, and connectivity test at regular intervals, and the quarterly maintenance period is an ideal time to do so.

During the health check, a two-hour performance baseline can be gathered as well.

The results of these scans can be saved and compared from month to month to determine when particular issues might have occurred.

Test Uninterruptible Power Supply

Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) equipment is commonly used to protect the server from sudden loss of power. Most UPS solutions include supporting management software to ensure that the server is gracefully shut down in the event of power failure, thus preserving the integrity of the system. Each manufacturer has a specific recommendation for testing, and the recommended procedures should be followed carefully. However, it should occur no less than once per month, and it is advantageous to schedule the test for the same time as any required server reboots.

Quarterly Maintenance

Although quarterly maintenance tasks are infrequent, some might require downtime and are more likely to cause serious problems with Exchange Server 2010 if not properly planned or implemented. Administrators should proceed cautiously with these tasks.

General quarterly maintenance tasks include the following:

• Check the Property pages of mailbox and public folder stores to verify configuration parameters, review usage statistics, determine mailbox sizes, and more.

• Evaluate the current rate of growth on server hard drives to ensure there is adequate space available on all volumes. This evaluation is based on the information gathered during the weekly maintenance tasks.

Validate Information Store Backups

As previously mentioned, the backing up of an environment’s data is one of the most important steps an organization can take to ensure recoverability in the event of a disaster.

However, simply backing up the data, and assuming the ability to recover it is inadequate.

Backups should be regularly restored in a test environment to ensure the recoverability of systems. By performing regular restores in a test environment, administrators are providing several services:

• Confirmation that the data is truly being backed up successfully

• Verification of the actual restore procedures

• Training for new Exchange Server administrators, or practice for existing ones, in the steps needed to recover an Exchange Server environment

Organizations that do not implement regular testing of restore procedures often find that, in the time of actual need, restorations take significantly longer than necessary because of missing hardware, missing software, inadequate or inaccurate procedures, administrators unfamiliar with the process, or, worst of all, backup sources that had been reported good, but are unable to be restored.