Capacity planning is the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products.A discrepancy between the capacity and demands results in inefficiency, either in under-utilized resources or unfulfilled customers.

As a part of Designing, Deploying, and Maintaining an enterprise Messaging system based upon Exchange Server 2010 infrastructure, it is imperative that proper Capacity planning is done to ensure performance and scalability. A well defined messaging infrastructure is the one where all aspects that affect the system are taken into consideration and baselines are established. A good plan would follow basic principle of:

• Profiling the Current Environment
  • Current System Load
  • Understand User Profiles (loads)
  • Review Hardware utilization
• Sizing the Systems
  • Hardware and Software
  • Current and expected growth
• Validation (confirmation)
  • Test and Analyze
  • Adjust against the baselines

Once the Profiling & Sizing has been taken care of, Validation should be done against baselines. Microsoft provides guidelines for identifying the Minimum, Maximum and Recommended configurations. There are many factors that affect Exchange Server performance and while selecting the hardware proper Capacity Planning & Sizing of the following components is extremely important:

• Memory: Consider what is supported in terms of No of Memory Slots, Largest Memory Module size and Memory Speeds.
• Storage: Factors to look for are Transactional I/O requirements, performance, reliability, capacities, ESRP reviewed to name a few.
• Processor: Consider requirements and support in terms of Kind of Processor, No of processors, Processor cores, Clock Speed.
• Network: Though it is self tuned, it is important to have redundant Gigabit Ethernet connections.

Exchange Capacity Planning Tools:

There are Microsoft tools available for all stages as mentioned above, let us have a look:

• Profiling the Current Environment
  • Exchange Profile Analyzer: Exchange Profile Analyzer is to be run against existing production environments based upon Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 to collect estimated statistical information from a single mailbox store or across an Exchange Server organization. The collected data then should be used for tasks as analyzing Performance and Health of Mailbox Server, improving Capacity Planning Models, and improving Testing methodologies and Tools.
  • Performance Monitor: The Performance Monitor simplifies the process of gathering performance monitor logs. It configures the correct counters to collect, sample intervals and log file sizes. This wizard can create logs for troubleshooting operating system or Exchange server performance issues.
• Sizing the Systems
  • Exchange 2010 Storage Calculator: On the successful completion of the profiling, Storage Calculator is the next tool to be used. It helps out in guidance on Role,  Backup, Storage etc requirements.
• Validation (confirmation)
  The validation process is to confirm and verify that everything that has been planned is up to mark
  • Exchange Jetstress 2010: Before getting Exchange 2010 in a production environment, Exchange Jetstress is the tool to be used to verify disk performance by simulating Exchange disk Input/Output (I/O) load. It simulates Exchange database and log file loads produced by a specific number of users. 
  • Exchange Load Generator 2010: Along with Jetstress, Exchange Load Generator 2010 (LoadGen) should be used to measure impact of MAPI, OWA, ActiveSync, IMAP, POP and SMTP clients on Exchange 2010 servers. It allows to test how a server running Exchange 2010 responds to e-mail loads.

Capacity Planning is a phase of Messaging Infrastructure deployment that needs special attention and these Microsoft Tools do make every Architect's life easy

Downloads:

• Performance Monitor
• Exchange Performance Analyzer
• Exchange 2010 Storage Calculator
• Exchange Jetstress 2010
• Exchange Load Generator 2010

We will cover these tools, in future articles.

 

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