Wouldn't hurt to ask them woscar. I'm open to all points of view regarding this.

Specimen303, where is the setting for the deleted item retention period found? Never seen that.

1. Open “Exchange System Manager”
2. Open the Properties for the Store that you would like to enable “Deleted Item Recovery” on.
3. Go to the Limits tab, and you will see the option “Keep deleted items for (days)”

Don't use Exchange on a Domain controller, its suicide!

Definitely get it on its own box and your troubles should go away. Its a piece of piss to migrate, just make a new box with exchange on it, get mail flow working using the best practice wizard then move the mail boxes over.

Oh and check that store.exe isn't taking up 100% cpu on the server.

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quote:

Originally posted by zag2me Don't use Exchange on a Domain controller, its suicide!

This. Also do people authenticate towards it? is it schema master and primary dns?

Is there some major job scheduled during that day of the month? Something that could take lots of cpu power, read/write performance or network bandwidth?

Yeah it's the primary DNS. And people authenticate to it too. It does support a lot, but then there has never been any problems up until now. Apart from a nightly backup it doesn't do anything too resource inducing.

I wish I could just migrate it to a box of it's own but my budget is already pretty much maxed out already for the next financial year and I don't see how we could squeeze it in. Does having it in a seperate box really make all the difference then? Why can't a DC and Exchange coincide on the same server?

quote:

Originally posted by DJ Mikey Mike Yeah it's the primary DNS. And people authenticate to it too. It does support a lot, but then there has never been any problems up until now. Apart from a nightly backup it doesn't do anything too resource inducing. I wish I could just migrate it to a box of it's own but my budget is already pretty much maxed out already for the next financial year and I don't see how we could squeeze it in. Does having it in a seperate box really make all the difference then? Why can't a DC and Exchange coincide on the same server?

They can, if the box is up to it. These days it's all about virtualisation, so it's not uncommon for many organisations to have several virtual servers on one physical server..... if your hardware is up to it.

To be perfectly honest with you, this is the last place I'd post with a question about an IT issue as serious as this. Are there no MSCPs in your organisation? If you haven't got anyone with enough knowledge about Exchange and MS Servers you're asking for trouble. It's like buying a Ferarri and expecting to save money on servicing by taking it to your local Skoda dealership.

If you really want the problem sorted out properly ask a professional to assist. I know of a superb team of Microsoft Certified Professionals in MK that would sort your problem in a few hours - PM me if you get to the stage where you need to get the pros in.

Jarv

Yeah we do have MSCPs we can consult with. We pay an external company for our support with issues like this, and in fairness to them they are very good, but with this particular problem they don't seem to be proving very useful.

Obviously I'd never use a music message board as the basis for deciding something like a box upgrade, but there are some very knowledgable people here that have proved very helpful in the past. The first post alone managed to help narrow down for me the particular group of users the problem was happening with. The main reason for this thread was to get some ideas of a place to start so I can push our support company in the right direction, as they seem very reluctant to go in any direction with it.

Thanks for the offer with the list of people in MK. When the contract with our current company is up for renewal perhaps I'll get in contact with you.

No worries - hope you get it sorted - things like this can be very frustrating, especially when they only surface a few times a month, meaning you just can't be sure if the last bunch of fixes have nailed the problem.

BTW, this company in MK, it's nothing to do with me, but i used to work with one of the new owners in a previous IT support role.

The company is Swift IT: http://www.swift-it.co.uk/

If you decide to call them, ask for Derry Barton, and tell them Ross sent you ;-)

It's little hard to come up with a solution without knowing fully the environment. If I could see event viewer, performance monitor, network bandwidth utilization, computer hardware configuration, update settings to name a few i could propably tell more. But now i can only say what comes first in mind.


btw. I'm actually MCITP: Enterprise Administrator (mcse 2008) and MCTS: Exchange 2007, sql 2008, win 7 etc. Also ccna, a+, network+, citrix certified administrator...