FSRM (File Server Resource Manager) in Windows Server 2003 R2 FAQ

Thought this was worth sharing as it came up on an internal discussion a few days ago. To find out more about FSRM in Windows Server 2003 R2, take a look here. Questions were being asked like, if a user kicked of a robocopy, for example, copying thousands of files all of which fail screening/quotas etc. FSRM can be configured to send emails on failures, but what would happen in these cirumstances - would an admin receive thousands of emails, on for each failure? Would the emails be concatenated into a single email? What would happen if the SMTP server were out?

Well it turns out that FSRM throttles all notification types, whether it be email, event log or anything else. The default throttling is 1 hour and is throttled per folder which has quota or screening settings. Therefore, if a file-copy were to violates the same screening rule, only one email per hour would be sent, and similarly logged to the event viewer. You can control the throttling per folder through the command-line interface utilities for FSRM, such as filescrn for screening. FSRM does not however retry if the SMTP server is out when a notification email needs to go out. Last interesting point, FSRM also sends WMI events - these are not throttled.

I haven't come across official documentation which goes into depth about throttling (I'm sure it does exist somewhere though), so hopefully this will help someone.