The Exchange mailbox database is always growing and when people say they cleanup you don’t see any changes in the mailbox database size (even not after the x days of the deleted item retention settings). You can see how much free space or white space there is in you mailbox database with a simple powershell command.
Open your Exchange Management Shell and use a combination of Get-MailboxDatabase with the -status option and you find the free space in the AvailableNewMailboxSpace attribute.
Put that all together in one command, you probably want something like :
Get-MailboxDatabase -Status | select Name, DatabaseSize, AvailableNewMailboxSpace
You will get an output like this:
Name DatabaseSize AvailableNewMailboxSpace ---- ------------ ------------------------ Mail01-DB01 92.89 GB (99,735,371,776 bytes) 9.023 GB (9,687,957,504 bytes) Mail01-DB02 115.5 GB (124,030,353,408 bytes) 4.528 GB (4,861,591,552 bytes) Mail01-DB03 113.9 GB (122,301,513,728 bytes) 49.69 MB (52,101,120 bytes)
The free space can be reclaimed when you do an offline defragmentation of the database.
Hi Martin, I saw this the other week so finished up a post that was sitting in my drafts folder. The AvailableNewMailboxSpace is not 100% accurate, and should not be used. Details in here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/rmilne/archive/2013/08/14/how-to-check-database-white-space-in-exchange.aspx
This is a good place to drop this:
NEVER do offline defrag on a DAG member.