Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1

Administrators that run healthy Exchange organizations and provide their users with good availability have something in common. They're attentive to their Exchange server's needs without overadministering the server. We have a list of the "big five" tasks that we recommend administrators perform daily:

• Perform and verify daily Exchange database backups.

• Verify that a sufficient amount of disk (and approximately the expected amount of disk space) is available.

• Check the Hub Transport server queues to verify that outbound messages are not stalled and queuing up.

• Review the event logs for unexpected errors or warnings.

• Confirm that your message hygiene software is up-to-date.

Granted these guidelines are just an overview of some basic tasks, but they give you an idea of the types of things you should do on a regular basis. These tasks have a few things in common. Most important, they are more focused on monitoring Exchange and checking to make sure things are done (like daily backups) than on performing any sort of direct action against the Exchange server. Contrary to popular belief, a stable, well-configured Exchange server does not need to be rebooted regularly, nor do databases need any sort of offline maintenance.

There are some basic auditing and diagnostics logging categories that should be enabled to allow the server to be audited or to get information about daily activity. Periodically, you may need to increase diagnostics logging on other components for troubleshooting and diagnostics. If more in-depth troubleshooting and diagnostics logging are used, they should be disabled or set back to their default values after you are through.

To know what normal behavior is for your server, though, you should do some basic performance monitoring periodically on your Exchange servers. It does not need to be done weekly or even monthly. Perhaps once every three to four months should be sufficient. Look at some of the common Windows and Exchange performance monitor counters to make sure you have not developed any bottlenecks.

Finally, Exchange administrators periodically find themselves faced with the need to remove content from users' mailboxes. This may be viruses, messages with unauthorized content, or just data that needs to be archived. Exchange 2007 provides a powerful new cmdlet called Export-Mailbox that serves this purpose.