Managing Quotas and Content Databases with multiple Site Collections

Question

Five content DBs are associated with a webapplication and each content DB can store upto 50GB.

We have configured a couple of site quotas as follows:

• basic_quota (1GB)
• collab_quota (2GB)
• Advanced_quota (5GB)
• Large_quota (10GB)

So whenever, we create a Site Collection we have to use any one of the above.

Lets say we want to create the following Site Collections:

• 10 x basic_quota (1GB * 10 = 10GB)
• 5 x collab_quota (2GB * 5 = 10GB)
• 3 x Advanced_quota (5GB * 3 = 15GB)
• 2 x Large_quota (10GB * 2 = 20GB)

In this case, SharePoint does not check the later availability, so it will allow us to create the above mentioned Site Collections.

So at the end of day, we have to move some of the Site Collections to another Content DB which can handle this.

We want to avoid this conflict while creating the Site Collections rather than solving this problem later.

What would be the right way to resolve this?

Answer 1

At my company we decided back in the SP 2003 days that it works best for us to store each site collection in it's own database. I've written a series of blog posts with source code talking about how we implemented this.

http://www.thelineberrys.com/default-category/how-to-store-each-sharepoint-site-collection-in-its-own-database.html

http://www.thelineberrys.com/default-category/how-to-store-each-sharepoint-site-collection-in-its-own-database---part-2.html

http://www.thelineberrys.com/default-category/how-to-store-each-sharepoint-site-collection-in-its-own-database---part-3-2.html