ESEUTIL & ISINTEG Utility in Exchange Server

ESEUTIL

ESEUTIL is a tool to defragment your exchange databases offline, to check their integrity and to repair a damaged/lost database.

ESEUTIL is located in the \EXCHSRVR\BIN directory. This directory is not in the system path so you must open the tool in the BIN directory or enhance the system path with the \EXCHSRVR\BIN directory.

Defrag

Exchange 2003 defragments the Exchange database every night. But this is only an online defrag of the database. An online defrag doesn’t reduce the size of the information store. To reduce the size of the databases, you must use an offline defrag.

When should I use an offline defrag?

Under normal conditions you don't need an offline defrag, but when you add tons of new users due to a merger or aquisition or when you delete many objects from the store it can be necessary to do an offline defrag.
You can do a space dump with ESEUTIL /MS to determine the space. Also ensure that you have 110% free diskspace associated with the Exchange database size.

Before you start:

• Make sure that the databases are really not startable
• Check the Application log for Exchange events that can tell you the cause of the failure
• Make a backup of the database
• Restart the server so that a soft recovery can be done

ISINTEG

ISINTEG is used to do some tests on your information store and to fix some detected errors and problems.
ISINTEG is the only repair utility that understands the Exchange database as an Exchange database.
What does this mean? ESE is a generic database engine that can be used by different applications (Exchange, Active Directory).
ESEUTIL looks into the database as just another ESE database, and can see their tables and indexes. ESEUTIL just fixes the database tables.
Now it is time for ISINTEG. ISINTEG is aware of the relation between database tables and records that turn them into folders and messages.
After you run ISINTEG –FIX, you will see many warnings but you can safely ignore these messages. You should only pay attendtion to the end of ISINTEG. There should be zero errors reported. If there is an error, run ISINTEG again.