Ravishankar's Exchange 1-oh-1: Exchange System Manager, stores and policies

In this continuation blog, we'll look at some of the basic things about what Exchange System Manager(ESM), Information stores and Policies are all about.

Exchange System Manager (ESM) is the interface through which we manage most of the Exchange related object. The Exchange Server 2003 Administration Guide covers all the interfaces in ESM, though i'll give you some of the areas you will frequently access.

Queue viewer:

This interface as shown above provides status of the various mail routing queues handled by the exchange server. You can freeze the mail flow by right clicking a queue a selecting FREEZE. This helps view the contents of the queue easily. Each queue in the above screen shot shows mails in various states and destinations, which is clearly described in the Server Admin guide.

Message Tracking Center:

This important peace of tool located in the TOOLS container of ESM is used for tracking the path of the mails sent/received by users for finding:

1. Possible mail delays using time stamps.

2. Means to confirm the delivery of a mail to a recipient.

3. Recipients of a mail in a Distribution list etc.

Every mail handled by a server is entered in a transaction log file, which can be used in a later date to view the overall flow of the mail through the Exchange organization, by collecting the logs from the servers that handled a particular mail.

In the Tracking Center the mandatory fields are Sender, Server, Recipient, Time range. When the results of a tracking job appears, double click it to view the sub-process and time stamps.

You can view the racking log settings in the General Tab of a server's properties.

Exchange stores are containers that hold the mailboxes and the data relevant to them. Exchange stores are made up of two system file <infoStoreName>.edb and <infoStoreName>.stm

Here the .EDB is the Exchange Database files stores the mailbox contents a particular format by converting them from their original form (this is for efficient handling of the data by the server). The .STM file is the streaming contents database, meaning it stores the Internet streaming contents as it is without converting them to a particular format (since converting them back and forth would require a good deal of CPU power and can bring down server performance).

These two system files are managed by a database engine called Extensible Storage Engine (ESE). This is the Engine responsible for handling every transaction like mails deletion, correction etc. Information on ESE is L300 stuff so this bit of information will suffice for now to dram a mental map of the exchange server back end.

Policies:

System policies container is under the Administrative group container in ESM.

There are three types of policies you can create, Server, Public Folder and Server policies.

For public folders store, you can set policies on Database settings, Replication settings, Limits settings and Full-text indexing settings as shown below.