Guest Post – How to Improve Your Exchange Performance

 

With more users each day identifying email as their most important tool, every incremental improvement you can squeeze out of your Exchange performance is victory. Unfortunately, it is the very criticality of email to your users that makes this an uphill battle. As users conduct more and more business using email, their storage needs increase, and as a result, the overall performance of your Exchange system can decrease. Fortunately, there's an easy-to-implement solution to this seeming paradox; and no, it doesn't require your users to delete messages, or for you to restrict them to mailboxes measured in megabytes. Email archiving can provide a big boost to your Exchange performance in several ways. Here are three that can provide you with immediate results.

1. Decreased database size
As databases grow, Exchange must spend more time on database management, more CPU cycles indexing and maintaining the database, and more RAM caching data. Much of what resides in a mailbox database is old; email that has no immediate need, but that users want to keep "just in case". Traditional Exchange management practices limited mailbox sizes which drove users to move old email to PSTs. PSTs are not scalable, and with the disk I/O improvements of Exchange, larger mailboxes reduce the need for PSTs, but these ever larger databases must still be indexed, and defragmented. Implementing an email archiving solution enables you to move older email to another data store on a separate system. Exchange databases are smaller, reducing the overhead associated with maintenance, but users are still able to access their older emails online. It's an easy way to improve Exchange performance.

2. Faster backups and restores
As nice as those huge mailboxes are, there comes a point where the time it takes to backup a database exceeds the time in your backup window. Worse still, should disaster strike, restoring larger databases can take longer than your recovery time objectives. Dividing mailboxes across more and more databases is not a scalable solution, as the administrative overhead of all those databases will soon overwhelm you, and you'd still have to prioritize your restores. Who gets restored first – The CEO or the Payroll team? By implementing email archiving, older messages can be moved to the archive, trimming the size of the mailbox databases without deleting important messages or reducing the available storage. Your Exchange performance gets a huge boost in the backup and restore category.

3. Accessibility
Too many times, the answer to email storage is the use of PST files. PSTs have a number of issues, not the least of which is that email contained within a PST in only accessible to the Outlook client that can physically access the file. Webmail, smartphones, and discovery efforts will all have problems accessing messages stored in PSTs. By implementing an email archiving solution, messages remain accessible to all mail clients, without having to add more and more storage to Exchange. Again, Exchange performance is improved by keeping mail accessible.

As you can see, implementing an email archiving solution is an easy way to boost your Exchange performance while also improving your DR and data accessibility positions.

This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Read more on how to improve your Exchange performance.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Recommended Exchange Reference Material

 

We all have books, whitepapers and documentation that we often end up referring to from time to time, whether it's a refresher on a topic you're a little rusty on or just to double check a few facts. For my benefit, and hopefully yours, here's my handy list of Exchange reference material…

Books

Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out – Tony Redmond
Exchange Server 2010 Best Practices – Siegfried Jagott & Joel Stidley
Exchange 2010 Powershell Cookbook – Mike Pfeiffer

Whitepapers

Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V
Exchange 2010 on VMware – Best Practices Guide
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Performance on vSphere 5
Best Practices for Exchange Server Public Folders
Publishing Exchange Server 2010 with Forefront UAG 2010 and TMG 2010
Exchange 2010 Large Mailbox Vision Whitepaper

Documentation and Reference

Exchange 2010 SP2 Full Help CHM Dec 2011
Exchange 2010 SP1 Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide
Exchange 2010 EPDS Deployment and Planning Services (EPDS)
JetStress Field Guide
Exchange Server 2010 Architecture Poster
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Transport Server Role Architecture Diagrams
RFC 2821 – SMTP
RFC 2822 – Internet Message Format
RFC 3501 – IMAP 4 Rev 1
RFC 1939 – POP3
RFC 2595 – Using TLS with IMAP, POP3 and ACAP
RFC 3261 – Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Updated – Recommended Exchange Reference Material

 

Now SP2 has been released, I've updated my list of Exchange Reference Material to contain the link to the new Exchange 2010 SP2 downloadable help file, also available here.

Thanks to Bart Smith for the tip. Bart also recommends Windows PowerShell in Action, Second Edition (which is also recommended as Exchange MCM prep). I haven't personally read it myself, but it looks worth checking out.

Updated – Disabling Auto-mailbox mapping in Exchange 2010

 

In February this year I wrote about how to disable the automatic mapping of shared mailboxes in Exchange 2010 SP1, using a custom PowerShell script that "wraps" the Add-MailboxPermission command and after execution, removes the attribute in Active Directory that is used to automatically mount the mailbox in Outlook.

With Exchange 2010 SP2, there's great news - this workaround is no longer required, as in SP2 a new parameter has been added to the native cmdlet.

Check out the updated article here, and stay tuned for a future article explaining how to extend this functionality to the Exchange Management Console

How to use Multi-Valued Custom Attributes in Exchange 2010 SP2

 

One of the new features in Exchange Server 2010, SP2, is the new ability to use Multi-Valued Custom attributes:

Exchange 2010 SP2 introduces five new multi-value custom attributes that you can use to store additional information for mail recipient objects. The ExtensionCustomAttribute1 to ExtensionCustomAttribute5 parameters can each hold up to 1,300 values. You can specify multiple values as a comma-delimited list.

These attributes (accessible only via the Exchange Management Console) can be used with most types of recipients, including Mailboxes, Mail Contacts, Remote Mailboxes and Distribution Groups, and you could use them to store all kinds of extra text-based information against accounts.

So, how do you use the new features? Well, if you are using Powershell, you can use them by assigning an array to the new Extension Custom Attribute1 - 5 properties. As an example, I'll create a simple array, assign it to ExtensionCustomAttribute1 property and then retrieve it:

As it's stored as an array, we can then use PowerShell to add extra attributes to it on demand:

In my example, I am using it to record changes. Although it's got limits, it still could be ideal to store a change log of certain actions to an account, such as the date a quota change was applied for example.

By the way, you'll notice the @{Add="Value"} syntax in the example above; if you aren't familiar with the syntax, you can read more here about Using Multivalued Properties in Exchange 2010.