Guided Tour of Defrag.NSF 3.00 Features - Part 6

In this installment we will take a look at more of the Technical Settings and integrated scheduling options available.

Technical Settings (Advanced)

On the “Advanced Settings” tab you can nominate a “Master Server” for your environment, this provides a distribution method for updating your Defrag.NSF licensing when you have Defrag.NSF deployed to a number of servers. Using the drop arrow you can point to the other servers running Defrag.NSF listed in the Domino Directory. Once the new license is installed/updated on the “Master” server you can use the “Distribute this server's license key to all Defrag.NSF databases” button to deploy the license to your other servers in the same domain that also run Defrag.NSF.

You can set Defrag.NSF to “Automatically run Defrag.NSF after a Compact or DBMT completes” by ticking the box next to this option. Once that option is checked Defrag.NSF will automatically run to remove any fragmentation created by a Compact or DBMT. Both these maintenance processes can create extensive fragmentation. Later we will check out the DBMT tab for integrated scheduling options.

Technical Settings (Processing Schedule Tab)

Use the settings on this tab to schedule the desired running times for defrag.NSF on this server. There are also options available to configure the defragging of transaction logs (.txn), DAOS files (.nlo) and Full Text Indexes (.ft) for this server and the option to enable the “Multi-stage” defragging Mode.

Enabling the “Multi-stage” Mode will allow Defrag.NSF to use it's multiple defragging engines to seamlessly toggle between file level and volume level defrag methods as required when dealing with difficult files. Using this feature allows Defrag.NSF to deal with insufficient freespace issues intelligently and on-the-fly. When confronted with a file larger than the largest available freespace chunk, Defrag.NSF will auto-toggle over to a full Volume Freespace Consolidation and proceed in that mode until the required amount of contiguous free-space has been assembled to allow effective defragging of the file in question.

Technical Settings (Shutdown Schedule Tab)
Use the settings on this tab to configure a defined shutdown time for Defrag.NSF. Most environments would not need to configure a Defrag.NSF shutdown time and can leave the default settings (disabled). In some circumstances configuring a shutdown time may be desirable if you notice Defrag.NSF running for extended periods on many large databases and would like to ensure that defragging does not continue to run during peak or high load times on the server.

Technical Settings (DBMT Schedule)
Domino 9 introduced the Database Maintenance Tool (DBMT), take advantage of this new tool for performing multiple daily/weekly administrative tasks on users' mail database files. Defrag.NSF provides complete integration with the new DBMT tool to allow scheduling, configuration options and running of both tools together. This provides the ultimate ease of use and best practice in your database maintenance regime. Use the configuration options on this tab to schedule DBMT with the required options for your server. This feature provides an easy to use control interface and eliminates the requirement to use program documents to configure and run the tool. Once DBMT has completed it's maintenance, Defrag.NSF can be set to
automatically run to clean up any fragmentation created by the DBMT tool.

Technical Settings (Freespace Defragmentation Tab)
Use the settings on this tab to configure the defragmentation of free-space on the nominated drive, this will correct the issue where large files cannot be effectively defragmented due to insufficient contiguous free-space on the drive. There is also an option to run this as a one-off maintenance process or as an ongoing and repeating maintenance process on the configured day(s).

Well that's it for the Tour, if you have followed this Guided Tour series of posts you will see that Defrag.NSF 3.00 is actually much more than just a simple Defrag tool and offers the Domino administrator a very mature and integrated one stop solution for total database maintenance with a lot of features for obtaining the best performance from Domino databases and also the other drives and files on the system.