Introduction   This is the first of a four part Web log where I will focus on the different server roles in Exchange 12 and their disk I/O characteristics. Over the next few months I'll be addressing other Exchange 12 storage concerns in three Read More

The Exchange Solution Reviewed Program – Storage (ESRP) is a Microsoft Exchange Server program designed to facilitate third party storage testing and solution publishing for Exchange Server.  The program combines a storage testing harness (Jetstress) Read More

Since I occasionally troubleshoot performance problems, I thought I’d write up the basics of the process I use.   Due to the nature of this topic, this isn’t going to be a comprehensive coverage of all possible performance problems.  I Read More

I have the pleasure of working for the Exchange Critical Situation team in North Carolina, so quite a few Disaster Recovery cases end up on my phone line.  The number one reason they end up there is that the company just has not planned for a failure.  Read More

As we mentioned before here, Exchange 2003 SP2 brings us increased database size limits for Exchange 2003 Standard servers with SP2 installed. There is more here than meets the eye, however, and I wanted to cover what the changes are exactly and how to Read More

Exchange Server can benefit from having basic disk partitions track-aligned.  Diskpar.exe is used for aligning a partition at the storage level, which, if used to create the partition, can have a significant positive performance impact on the storage Read More

Hi, I’ve hopefully met many of you at TechEd, IT Forum, or another Exchange community event – but if not, I hope to meet you there soon and I’ll introduce myself now to get it out of the way. I’m the General Manager of the Exchange product team. I’ve Read More

I wanted to make sure you all knew about this little bit of information, buried in the page and the FAQ about Exchange 2003 SP2: Q. Did the storage limit change? A. Based on feedback from customers like you and because of the evolution of e-mail Read More

EXOLEDB creates a number of system folders under the NON_IPM_SUBTREE during the Accept Clients phase of MDB initialization.  Some of the folders remain for historic reasons, but most have real purposes and impact on the server should they be deleted.  Read More

This is a third and the last post in my Mailbox Manager series. Please go here for Part 1 and here for Part 2!   Here are some of the most frequently asked questions that we have seen on Mailbox Manager:   Q: Does moving a user’s mailbox Read More

This is a part 2 of my 3 part series on Mailbox Manager, please go here to read the part 1! There is a task (CMBCleanTask) within MAD.EXE that runs every 15 minutes and figures out if the schedule information says it is now time to run. The schedule Read More

Note: the following applies to “streaming” backups, not to the VSS backups.   Exchange transaction logs track all the changes to a database. If a database crashes, no harm done, because the transaction logs always secure changes before the crash. Read More

This article is #3 in the VSAPI series. Please go here for part 1 or here for part 2 of the series! Background Scanning When VSAPI Background Scanning is enabled, a single thread running at THREAD_PRIORITY_BELOW_NORMAL is created per MDB on the system. Read More

Thanks to everyone whose posted questions and comments to my previous blog post!  Since I’ve had so many questions on calculating IO, I thought I’d go into a bit more. First, there are many ways to calculate the disk IO per user.   Read More

This is a part 2 of the AV API series - for part 1, please see here. On Access scanning takes place when the client initiates a request for an item. At the completion of the scanning process ptagVirusScanningStamp is updated reflecting the results of Read More