I have read a number of articles that seem to suggest that Exchange Server 2013 can be configured with a separate database (EDB file) per mailbox, but I can't find an article that says how to do that.
Is that possible, and if so, how do I accomplish that?
Thanks for any guidance.
The *.EDB file is a file which store all mailboxes created inside them (a kind of Database file). Technically you could create multiple *.EDB files and then put only one mailbox in that. However this wouldn´t really make sense so I couldn´t see why somebody would mention that in some articles that this is a good idea.
Additional: The amount of possible *.EDBs is limited so doing that do not make any sense. An Exchange Standard Server allow 5 *.EDBs and Enterprise Server 100 (see here).
The correct way however is to use multiple *.EDBs and then spread the workload caused by the mailboxes across them. This is known to be best practices as the preferred DB size is 200GB for a stand alone server and 2TB for a High availability setup as mentioned here for Exchange 2013.
P.S. You also can setup a quota for 5GB on one *.EDB and all mailboxes inside that one would use the quota. On another *.EDB you can specify only 1 GB. This allows you to handle the quota on the DB level and not on the mailbox level.