- Managing shared mailboxes in Office 365 with PowerShell - Thu, May 5 2016
- Managing shared mailboxes in Office 365 with the GUI - Wed, May 4 2016
- Installing and configuring the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) - Wed, Mar 16 2016
There are two kinds of quotas: soft quotas and hard quotas. A soft quota means that the disk space limits are not enforced. A user will be allowed to go over the quota and will not be prevented from adding additional data. Soft quotas are good for monitoring usage and generating notifications. A hard quota means that disk space limits are enforced. A user will not be allowed to store data beyond what has been allowed in the quota. Hard quotas are used for controlling disk space usage especially in SLA situations where customers pay for set blocks of storage.
Share Quotas
In the FSRM administrative tool, go to Quota Management then Quotas. Click Create Quota…
FSRM Create Quotas
In our example, we’ll be applying a quota to a departmental file share for the Marketing department. I’ve already selected the folder that is shared to the department: D:\Shares\marketing. Microsoft recommends using quota templates for generating quotas rather than setting everything manually every time. My experience has been that this is, by far, the best way to set up quotas. In the example, I’ve used the ‘100 MB Limit’ as the template.
FSRM Create a Quota
The important thing to remember with the templates is that they are just that, templates. You’re not stuck with any of the settings in the templates once you select one and create the quota. You can go in at any point and tweak the settings without being permanently stuck with the settings from the template.
From the Quota Properties screen, you can change the disk space limit and control whether this is a hard or a soft quota. You can also make changes to the notifications that end users receive when the quota starts reaching your pre-determined thresholds.
FSRM Quota Properties
Threshold warnings are sent via email. They use the administrator email address we configured earlier in Part 2 and the email address (from Active Directory) of the user that reached the threshold. Whenever possible, I like to go into the Additional E-mail Headers… and add someone who can be considered an owner of the share so that someone else can be aware that the share is reaching its quota. I also like to completely ditch the entire message body and re-write it into something that is understandable for someone that isn’t technical. It is still useful to keep troubleshooting information in the email for IT; but, my experience has been that most people either ignore the quota warning or simply don’t know what to do with it if you use the pre-configured verbiage.
FSRM Additional E-Mail Headers
User Quotas
Setting user quotas in FSRM isn’t as straightforward as shares, but it can be done. First, we’ll start off in the FSRM administrative tool, Quota Management then Quotas. Click Create Quota. In the example, I’ve set the Quota path to D:\Users and set the Auto apply template and create quotas on existing and new subfolders option.
FSRM Auto Apply Template
After clicking create, you’ll be taken back to the main screen of the FSRM administrative tool. To get the quotas to show up, you’ll need to click the Refresh option.
FSRM - Refresh Quotas
As new users are added, they will be given the same quota template that you specified earlier. Should you need to change everyone’s quota (say after a storage upgrade), you can select the user share’s quota entry, and choose Edit Quota Properties. When you choose a new template, you’ll be given several options that, honestly, make very little sense. Here are the translations:
Apply auto apply quota only to derived quotas that match the original auto apply quota. – Translation: All existing quotas are changed to the new quota unless they have been changed. (This means any users/folders that you’ve given more quota space will not receive new quotas.) All new folders created will have the new quota applied.
Apply auto apply quota to all derived quotas. – Translation: All existing quotas are changed to the new quota. (This includes any individual or one-off changes you may have made to individual folders/users.) All new folders created will have the new quota applied.
Do not apply auto apply quota to derived quotas. – Translation: Existing quotas are not changed. All new folders created will have the new quota applied.
Update Quotas Derived from Auto Apply Quota
In my next post I will cover File Screening.
It is not very clear.
We have previously set quotas on Windows Server 2003 at disk-level and we can control the size of the disk per user throughout the volume (in your private folders and shared folder with other users).
Now, with this new feature just because the old remains (very confusing), we can not control the user quota in the shared folders.
Do not you?
Regards
Ramon
I’m not sure I completely understand your question. Quotas are handled at the folder level on the volume, not at the share level. I would recommend going to our forums (https://4sysops.com/forums) and posting a description of how you’ve configured your file server along with what you’re trying to accomplish.
Thank you Kyle. I’m in the process of implementing user quotas and I found this tutorial to be very useful.
I have installed and configured FSRM in my windows 2008 R2 std server. But I can able to send a warning threshold mail when my server is in the workgroup. Once I joined my server into our domain, I not able to send warning thresholds mail and I got error ” A File Server Resource Manager Service email action could not be run.
Error-specific details:
Error: IFsrmEmailExternal::SendMail, 0x8004531c, Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.1 Client does not have permissions to send as this sender. EVENT ID 12306.
Please help us….
Sounds like you’re using Exchange, but you didn’t include whether you’re using a standalone SMTP server or if you’re pointing to an Exchange server. If you’re using Exchange, the computer account has to have rights to authenticate against Exchange and has to have Send As permissions on the mailbox you’re using.
Thanks kyle, We are using SMTP under exchange server…
Thanks for your advise..
Kyle,
Great post, but still confusing. I am in the process of changing the message body of a quota template. Since I have numerous folders that are using the same template but a few have different quotas, which of the three options would I use so that they all receive the updated message body but the quotas are not unchanged?
I don’t have that configuration anywhere where I could test it. Your best bet would be to duplicate your setup in a VM test environment where you can have a “before” snapshot of the environment and then test each option. Once you’ve tested an option, you can revert to the original configuration to try the others.
Hi,
i have erreur like Siva kumar:
Erreur: IFsrmEmailExternal::SendMail, 0x8004531c, 5.7.1 Relaying denied. Proper authentication required.
i m not used Exchange
Your Sendmail SMTP server has relaying disabled for unauthenticated systems/users. You’ll need to whitelist the IP address of your file server in Sendmail or set up an SMTP server that can be used for relaying mail for those systems (like FSRM) that don’t support authentication or certain forms of encryption for SMTP.
When I use these settings to another server that is already sent to the alerts it works.
Just because another server can send through the SMTP server doesn’t mean that FSRM is the culprit. You could have antivirus (McAfee specifically) that is blocking SMTP on the server. The SMTP could have a firewall that is blocking SMTP. You may need a username/password to authenticate (which FSRM doesn’t support). The error message you posted earlier leads me to believe that you need to perform additional configuration on your Sendmail server.
I found that the GPO Group Policy is not applied in the server that not sent emails
it may be that this has an influence ?!
I don’t know which Group Policy setting you’re referring to.
i dont have role smtp instalied in these servers !
Hi Kyle,
I created the quotas for our Home drive directory (D:\Home\*) and the user’s folders are showing in the quota paths and are reporting. But when a user looks at their drives it shows the size of the volume not the quota. How to fix this?
Guys,
I am using office 365 account, how to configure email alter without SMTP Server
You’ll need to set up an on-premises SMTP server and relay mail through it into your Office 365 tenant.
I am trying to set up a pop up, so to speak, for users when they reach xx% of their allocated storage. I am attempting to do this with a small script that just messages %currentuser% to let them know they are running out of room. However, the message never pops up. What could i be doing wrong?
Is there not some sort of centralized environment wide quota tool? We are going to ultimately have quotas all over the place and it’d be a lot easier to see it in one place than having to go to the server directly (or even change the server connection in one fsrm console).
Let’s say I created a Quota Template and then applied it to a ‘Folder and Sub-folder’ which consists of 5000 folders. I then decide that I no longer want quotas on these folders.
1. Deleting the Quota Template does not delete the Quotas
2. Creating another Template and applying it to the top-level folder does not apply to sub-folders, unless I go to Source Template under Quotas and go to edit and then re-apply
3. Selecting all and deleting takes a very long time or crashes the MMC
4. Disabling has the same behavior
What is the best practice method for removing quotas that were implemented via a Template, or disabling all of them?
It seems like if I create a new Template, apply it to the top-level folder, go to it under ‘Quotas,’ edit it and make no changes and hit ‘OK’ it then applies to all. That doesn’t really help me in regards to deleting all the quotas.
I must be missing something or FSRM is supremely lacking.
Hello, I have a problem. It seems impossible to set a hard quota on C: drive root folder. It works for D: but if I try on C: it always reverts to soft quota. Anybody knows a reason for it? I am thinking about using FSRM quotas to prevent C: drive from being filled by some user copying too much data onto it via a share for example.
We recently upgraded our file servers to 2016 and in the process created a new quota template that provides 2GB of directory space instead of 1GB (generous, I know). The old template does not exist on the new server at all. As a result, while new home directories created will have the new 2GB going forward, I have a ton of old directories that still have 1GB quotas.
Complicating things is the fact that I have manually increased several users’ quotas. I can’t reset the quota for the entire directory because it’ll reset my manual changes in the process. Is there a way to bulk change these 1GB directories via powershell or the old deprecated dirquota?
Kyle,
for some reason, when the user returns under the allowed quota, the server still sends alerts. How do I reset the counter so it doesn't send that user more alerts?
Thank you!
Damir