M365 and AZURE Blog

Monday, May 10, 2010

What is your Item Count?

I hear you are performing troubleshooting on your exchange server and you come cross not the size of mailbox the item count in critical path folders makes the difference. If you did not know this keep reading as I know you will find this post very useful.

Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007 suffered from I/O fear long time due to new optimized and improved structure of ESE providing shooter and sequential I/O’s

Exchange does many small, random input/outputs (I/Os) which allows Exchange 2010 to use JBOD configuration with cheap disk ( SATA)

Store Schema changes
DB I/O size improvements
Database cache effectiveness improvements
ESE optimizes for new schema

~~Results:~~

E2010 reduces the I/O by additional 70% when compared to E2007 and 160% compared to Exchange 2003.

Large item count per folder is an issue due to restricted views (affects large mailbox deployments)

Schema changes of the table structure and deferred index updates greatly improves restricted view performance

~~Result:~~ Supports 100,000 items per folder

Outlook Personal Folder Files (PSTs) are a litigation, security, and management nightmare
New Messaging Records Management features
Item level policy settings
Archive mailbox feature for importing and storing PST data
Compliance Officer search capabilities

~~Result:~~ PSTs can be removed by placing data into Exchange repository and can be searched easily.

After al these good information you decided to look to see what is the item count on your mailbox. Remember you will need to take into consideration of critical path folders which the folders are.

Calendar,
Contacts,
Inbox
Sent Items

~~Version Folder limits~~

Exchange 2000/2003	5000
Exchange 2007	20.000
Exchange 2010	100.000

Click here to download

Get-Mailbox -identity dedealoc -ResultSize 'Unlimited' | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics | Select-Object -property 'Date', 'Name', 'FolderPath','ItemsInFolder', 'FolderSize'

~~Note:~~ after installing PGUI if this is your first time and you have no clue what to do

make right click on PGUI select new Folder
Name the folder anything you like click Apply on the bottom

Now I assume you download the PS1 I uploaded on my website to your desktop.

Now on the folder . new Script node

Click open on the file picture brose the PS script and bring it into PGUI

Give it a name and click Apply to save it

As you see it runs as soon as you click on it

PGUI is the *BEST* tool out there and as you can see it is so efficient and easy to use. You can collect your own PS scripts and make PGUI even more efficient for your environments. At this point export the report to CSV and calculate the folder items mentioned earlier to get the item count.

You can find out your heavy users and educate them how to lessen the these folders or perhaps go for Exchange 2010 (-: and not worry about 20.000 item count limits at all

Best regards,
Oz Casey , Dedeal
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +
Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog
Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)
Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

Friday, May 7, 2010

Perfwiz for Exchange 2010 & 2007

If you have not seen “ Perfwiz for Exchange 2010” by Mark Lagase , you really are missing nice tool you might need to use one day to identify the the bottle neck on your messaging environment. These are pre-set PerWiz template will make your life extremely easy so check it out

~~E210 PerfWiz~~

http://blogs.technet.com/mikelag/archive/2010/01/11/perfwiz-for-exchange-2010.aspx

~~E07 PerfWiz~~

http://blogs.technet.com/mikelag/archive/2008/05/02/perfwiz-replacement-for-exchange-2007.aspx

here is real nice useful link from Mike site

http://blogs.technet.com/mikelag/archive/tags/Performance/default.aspx

I really like Mike’s site it has tons of great stuff………………..

Thursday, May 6, 2010

What will Kill your Exchange Server so Quick ???

The performance troubleshooting can be tough time to time as it can be difficult to see or identify the bottleneck. The bottleneck and what to look for when it comes down to performance. Although seeing Xmas balloon in outlook makes many of the Exchange administrator go bananas, the reality is , the heavy MAPI is easy to influenced and get worst with some many factors. This includes client side troubleshooting as well as Server side troubleshooting etc.

Most of the issues I have seen so far caused by I/O related issues and problems in Exchange 2003 and 2007 as SAN is big part of complex Exchange and cluster configurations. The worst and most frustrating part is to deal with SAN and its when problems balls down to IOPS.

Beside Exchange 2007 is complicated already, adding SAN into picture makes is even more complicated.

So imagine , most of the I/O will occur in the DISK resources and Exchange will love to hammer the hard disk logs and databases and outlook goes bananas.

If you are in the situation and need to find out what is going on here is your best friend and tool ~~ExTRA~~ ( Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant). You have to got to LOVE this tool as it is incredibly useful.

bare in mind the basic applies most of the troubleshooting cases. For most of the disk issues here what you need to know at the basic.

Check the performance counter below, they pretty much are explaining what will be the acceptable , upper limit. The bottom line is the PyhsicalDisk Averaged Disk sec/Write got to be <10ms Ideally , and the spikes should never be >50ms.

*** I have seen recently problems when Averaged Disk sec/Write >20ms as result , Outlook famous balloon pops up**** this isn't quite good experience and hard to explain client why it is happening (-:

Also Check out “Perfwiz replacement for Exchange 2007” this is real nice resource, as pre defined counters are there for Exchange 2007

http://blogs.technet.com/mikelag/archive/2008/05/02/perfwiz-replacement-for-exchange-2007.aspx

So what has changed in Exchange 2010? if I have to say one thing made me so happy , dealing with E210, I would say no more SAN and yes less complexity. Having only Exchange administrator eyes on the Exchange servers is great. We no longer need SAN expert to help us configuring or run and maintain Exchange 2010.

I think most of places who are using SAN do not know what to do if they get Exchange off the SAN, going for DAS and implementing DAG seems to be very optimal for most of these places. Huge saving are coming with using cheap SATA disk.

The I/O improvement in Exchange 2010 is 60 to 70 percent more compare to Exchange 2007, Investments done by exchange team in store schema and ESE (Extensible storage Engine ) have reduces IOPS by 70 percent more thus E210 is incredibly fast , bringing outstanding user experience not to mention tons of other improvements.

being able to implement JBOD ( bunch of disk ) yes we are talking about cheap SATA disk 7200RPM , with NO RAID , NO RAID controller is stunning. In recent when I see the saving in $$$$ I could not believe my eyes to be honest for large implementations. The saving $$$$ is HUGE. I will be honest I have not seen yet or done JBOD scenario but knowing from some of MVP colloquies the JBOD is working perfect.

So the future of Exchange change a lot, the other competitors ( Gmail) were depressing Exchange in my personal opinion for the cost when MB cost is 4buks Exchange 2007 MB cost was bit over 16 dollars. Now I am asking myself what will be left when you take that away (-: , E210 MB cost can be less than 4 Bucks not to mention , so many incredible futures and incomparable messaging experience with any other messaging application.

if you have not had your hands on E210, without wasting too much time go get evaluation copy and see with your own eyes , what does it look like the next generation messaging application.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

How do I open another user's mailbox in OWA 2010?

If whatever reason you or someone in your company needs access to someone else mailbox here are easy steps showing how to achieve this goal.

login to OWA using your own mailbox email address and password
Click on your name in the upper right corner of the window

Type the user name whom mailbox you wish to connect too. In this case I am going to connect mailbox called RBuzon, so I will type the name of the mailbox in the window as fallows

You get fallowing

It is obvious as you expected without having proper rights I should not have been able to look others mailboxes.

Connect to your exchange server, find the user you wanted to connect his mailbox too

Click on “Manage Full Access Permissions” and add your account in there

Click finish to get out

Try one more time, as you see this time I can access with no issues

Learning points: You have to assign yourself or given proper permissions to access someone else mailbox rather than yourself. You can use OWA to access this mailbox.

Reference:

~~Scenario:~~

User name: Dedealoc (he needs access to RBuzon mailbox via OWA)
User name: RBuzon

Adding mailbox permission "RBuzon" for user "Dedealoc" with access rights "'FullAccess”