Wednesday 3 October 2018

Exchange 2013 Maintenance: Logs

Take a full backup. Once you take full backup all your logs will vanish. Else what?
 
Circular logging should not be enabled in a production environment. Circular logging are manually enabled only if you have noticed that the Exchange logs are enormously growing due to the following: either the nodes are unhealthy or there wasn't any successful exchange full backup.
 
To clear unwanted or orphaned logs, apart from enabling circular logging, it is also safe to dismount the Exchange DBs and mount back again. However, before doing it make sure to have a successful Exchange backup.
 
Exchange 2013:
 
Step1: ECP>>Servers>>Databases>>select required DB>>Check Active and Passive server's DB health. should be healthy. Double Click DB>>Maintenance>>Enable/Disable Circular logging. (Should not be enabled unless and otherwise required)
 
Step2: ECP>>Servers>>Databases>>select required DB>>Check Active and Passive server's DB health. should be healthy>>click more (3 dots...)>>Dismount. make sure the process completes successfully>> Mount the DB back again. And make sure the DB status shows mounted and healthy.
 
What if the log drive is full and exchange is down?
 
It is not a good idea to enable circular logging on a mailbox sever. As you may be aware that log drive should not be on a system drive, recommended to have a dedicated drive. Capacity planning is required for at least a period of 2-3 years both for SBM and large enterprise level org.
 
Consider moving the log files from the log drive to a temporary storage until the backup issue gets resolved. Once you have enough space, enable circular logging. Uncheck this feature after making sure there is enough log drive space.
 
In a nutshell circular logging recycles the logs.  Exchange relies on transaction or write-ahead logs to store events before they are committed to the database.  When the defined logs have been filled up, circular logging assumes that the first log must have been committed and recycles the logs to save disk space.
 

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