Hello,
I'm studying for the 70-640 exam and while practicing in my lab environment I performed an offline defragmentation of the Active Directory-database. Seeing as this is a test-environment, the file size of NTDS.dit wasn't that big to begin with - only around 20MB, so my expectations wasn't through the roof to begin with. However, after performing the offline defragmentation using the following method, the file size of NTDS.dit ended up at 34MB.
The offline defragmentation was performed in the following manner, as described in the following Technet-article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794920(v=ws.10).aspx
net stop ntds (Which also stops all dependent services)
ntdsutil
activate instance ntds
files
compact to c:\temp
Exit out of ntdsutil and backup the old ntds.dit-file
del d:\ntds\*.log
copy c:\temp\ntds.dit e:\ntds\ntds.dit (Database-files and log-files are stored on separate drives)
ntdsutil
activate instance ntds
files
integrity
Exit out of ntdsutil
net start ntds
So my questions are:
Am I doing something wrong, or is there a minimum size where a defragmentation is feasible?
Any ways to easily inflate the file size to verify that I'm doing the procedure correctly with the expected result?
Thanks!
Andreas