If I cannot bring you comfort, then at least I bring you hope

As we get ready to celebrate the beginning of a new year (in many countries), now is a good time to plan for your Exchange Servers and what you'll be doing in the year ahead.  While this is not the best time to plan out new infrastructure or massive overhauls immediately, you can start planning what you'll do later in the year on that scale.  You can also plan for what you'll do right off the bat in January for things like maintenance and updates/upgrades.

I plan to dedicate entire columns to these topics in the next few weeks, but here's the overview to get you thinking (once the champagne wears off...):

Offline Maintenance is a good thing to do regularly for Microsoft Exchange.  About once or twice a year you will probably want to take the time and walk through the process.  Microsoft says that this is not a solid requirement, but it can help identify long-trending problems deep within a database, so doing it once or twice per year is time-consuming, but worth it.  Plan now for downtime, so that you don't have to worry about when you'll have the ability to do it later. 

Online Maintenance is automatic, but you may want to look at your Exchange Server profile and see when the best time to have it done really is.  By default, the online maintenance system will run every night, but if you're also performing backups overnight, the two systems can overlap, causing the maintenance to be halted and never finish.  Take a look at your event logs to see if both systems are operating normally, or if the online maintenance run is terminating early.  If it is, you may want to change the times it runs, or even only run it on certain days.  Unlike with Exchange 2000, later versions of Exchange can hold up admirably well with even weekly maintenance runs, but be aware of what won't get done until maintenance by checking out Microsoft's Knowledge Base and/or waiting until my upcoming column on the topic.

Test, test, test, test, test......then test again! Now is the perfect time to set out your goals for testing of recovery/availability solutions (see disclaimer at the bottom of the page).  Backup systems, failover systems and other recovery solutions MUST be tested, otherwise how do you know they're doing what they say they're doing.  Best bets: do a test restore of Exchange data (at all the levels available from your tool like database, mailbox, mail item) to a different directory on the Exchange server and mount the DB in a Recovery Storage Group to ensure it is working properly.  This should most likely be done once per month, but at least once per quarter.  It doesn't require downtime, and doesn't require end-users to do anything.  Perform a failover test (if you use a failover tool) or a total restore test at *least* once per year.  2x per year or once per quarter is better, but of course since this type of testing will impact end-users, scheduling can be an issue.

Housekeeping is never a bad thing to look at after the clock strikes midnight on January 1.  Are you reaching your database limits in Exchange Standard edition?  If so it's time to either start ratcheting down mailbox limits or else starting to plan your upgrade strategy.  If you're already on Enterprise edition, are you pushing the limits of the free disk space you have on your drives?  Plan now to move the databases to another partition with more space.  Have your Stores grown to alarming proportions?  Might be time to start planning out new Stores and even Storage Groups to distribute the load.

Finally, give a look through the event logs and such to see if there are repetitive errors or other trends that can indicate problems brewing.  One more common example of this is recurring event ID's 1018, 1019, and 1022.  These indicate that there could be problems brewing in the database itself, though it is very possible that the error events are the only indication you see until the DB crashes.  If you're looking for a tool to help wade through the log information, check out Splunk, an IT search solution set that can make your life a lot easier.  [Due Disclosure: Splunk is currently working on partnerships with Double-Take Software.]

Have a healthy, happy and safe New Year's celebration.  Here's hoping 2009 exceeds everyone's wildest dreams in terms of greatness, and that Exchange never ceases to help us all live in these very interesting times.

Until next year.....

Mike Talon, Chief Columnist, BeingExchanged.com

PS: The title of this posting is taken from the song "Closing of the Year" from the movie soundtrack to "Toys."  The lyrics of the first verse are incredibly relevant to our combined experience this year, and I offer them here:

If I cannot bring you comfort,
then at least I bring you hope
For nothing is more precious than the time we have, and so
We all must learn from small misfortunes
Count the blessings that are real
Let the bells ring out for Christmas
At the closing of the year

- The Musical Cast of Toys Featuring Wendy and Lisa