Four Hardware Don’ts and Exchange

I was talking with a customer regarding his exchange issues yesterday on his new server he purchased from, I will say my competition and I was astounded that he was sold a product that was truly not not meant for what his Exchange application required and that his rep really had no idea what the current requirements call for.

Now I have been building and selling systems for 20 years and there is some fundamental rules I follow : What is this box's primary purpose, and always look at what the applications current requirements are then give headroom!

So with this being said I found this article by Brien Posey, MCSE. Brian is is a five-time recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for his work with Exchange Server,Windows Server, Internet Information Services (IIS), and File Systems and Storage. Brien has served as CIO for a nationwide chain of hospitals and was once responsible for the Department of Information Management at Fort Knox. I hope you find it worth while.

Four Hardware Don'ts When Optimizing Performance for Exchange

Optimizing Exchange 2007 performance can alleviate administrator and user woes.When you’re doing all you can to improve server performance, make sure you don’t make these mistakes.

THERE ARE MANY tips and best practices you can follow to improve Microsoft Exchange Server’s performance. But here are four things you should never do at the hardware level if you want to optimize performance for your users and administrators.

1. Don’t use a single-core processor on an Exchange mailbox server. When it comes to Exchange system performance, using a single-core CPU on a mailbox server is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. The actual impact of doing so, however, varies depending on which version of
Exchange Server you’re running and on how many mailboxes the server is hosting. For several years, I ran Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition ona single-core, 32-bit Pentium III with
1 GB of RAM. The server performed well, but it only hosted five mailboxes. Exchange Server 2007 is far more demanding than Exchange 2003. When Exchange 2007 was first
released, I wanted to add several new Exchange servers to my lab environment. Unfortunately, I tried to keep costs down by purchasing a few 64- bit servers with 2 GB of RAMand a
single-core AMD processor. Although the Exchange mailbox server wasn’t hosting any production mailboxes, it ran painfully slow. Simply clicking on a container in the Exchange Management Console (EMC) would cause a 20-second delay before the screen refreshed itself.
Eventually, I replaced this server with one that had a quad-core processor; the difference was noticeable.

What doesMicrosoft have to say about CPU cores and their effect on Exchange Server? According to the Microsoft knowledgebase , CPU and memory scalability for Exchange Server 2003 and for Exchange 2000 Server, a dual-core processor’s performance can be up to 90% better than what a comparable single-core CPU can deliver on Exchange 2000 or 2003 servers. In addition, Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 servers can take full advantage
of up to eight CPUs (or CPU cores). All of the Exchange 2007 server roles experience some benefit from having multi-core processors, although the increase in performance over a single-core CPU varies from server role and processor type. The roles that seem to benefit the most from multiple CPU cores are the Mailbox Server role and the Unified Messaging role.

2. Don’t assume that the hardware vendor is telling the truth. It’s tempting to assume that all hardware vendors know what they’re talking about. But for the sake of Exchange Server performance, don’t. Recently, I needed to purchase a new server. Because of the lastminute
nature of the project, I didn’t get a chance to research available servers. For this particular deployment,deployment, I needed an Exchange server with a quad-core processor and a
bare minimum of 8 GB of RAM for performance. I found a server at a reasonable price that looked like it might get the job done, but it only came with 2 GB of RAM. The salesperson
said the memory could be expanded to 16 GB. That was perfect for my needs, but I decided to double check. After doing some research on the Internet, I discovered that the server in question was only expandable to 4 GB. The point is this: Even if you’ve been using the same hardware vendor for a while, it pays to do your homework before purchasing expensive server hardware.

3. Don’t assume that adding more memory will increase performance. Any mailbox server with too much memory can hurt Exchange Server performance. The more memory an Exchange 2007 mailbox server has, the longer it takes the server to populate its cache after a reboot. Until a cache has reached its optimal size, the server generally doesn’t perform well.

4. Don’t max out a server’s hardware configuration to obtain optimal performance. I have seen some servers with specifications that indicate that the memory can be expanded beyond what is
really practical. For example, a lot of older servers used PC3200 memory. Hardware limitations prevent such servers from accepting more than 16 GB of memory. But some ads for
these servers say they can accommodate up to 32 GB of memory. How is this possible?
PC3200 memory is backward compatible with PC2700 memory. PC2700 memory is slower than
PC3200, but it can be used to reach configurations of up to 32 GB—assuming the system board supports that much memory. Theoretically, increasing a server’s memory could
require using slower hardware.