Understanding Storage Configuration: Exchange 2010 Help. This section provides best practice information about supported disk and array controller configurations. Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is often used to both improve the performance characteristics of individual disks (by striping data across several disks) as well as to provide protection from individual disk failures.
With the advancements in Exchange 2013 high availability, RAID is not a required component for Exchange 2013 storage design. However, RAID is still an essential component of Exchange 2013 storage design for standalone servers as well as solutions that require storage fault tolerance. Operating System, System, or Pagefile Volume The recommended configuration for an operating system, system or pagefile volume is to utilize RAID technology to protect this data type.
The recommended RAID configuration is either RAID-1 or RAID-1/0, however all RAID types are supported. Separated Mailbox Database and Log Volumes Mailbox Database and Log Volume Co-Location. Configure Protocol Logging: Exchange 2010 Help. Subscription Edition Protocol logging records the SMTP conversations that occur between messaging servers and between Exchange services in the transport pipeline as part of message delivery. The following options are available for the protocol logs of all Send connectors and Receive connectors on the Exchange server: Specify the location of the protocol log files. What do you need to know before you begin? Estimated time to complete: 5 minutesYou need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure or procedures. Use the EAC to configure protocol logging Use the EAC to enable or disable protocol logging on a connector Use this procedure to enable or disable protocol logging on a Send connector or a Receive connector in the Transport service on Mailbox servers, or a Receive connector in the Front End Transport service on Mailbox servers.
Use the EAC to configure the location of the protocol logs on an Exchange server How do you know this worked? Notes: Excessive Paging on Exchange. For a list of current recommendations to help alleviate these issue, click here Recently, there has been a rash of performance issues on Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers where they become unresponsive due to excessive paging.
Previously this was tracked down to .NET garbage collection not occurring properly which caused managed services to consume excessive amounts of memory. Applying was the fix for this. If you have installed SP1 for Exchange 2007, we currently recommend to apply .NET 2.0 SP1 to the server which contains this fix. Even if you have this hotfix installed, excessive paging was still occurring. Here is a screenshot of all processes working sets. If you look at all of the processes, they are all getting trimmed at the same time. Memory Planning considerations can be found in the help file at So you may ask, what is causing this? Shown below are the working sets from all processes. Windows Disk Timeouts and Exchange Server 2010 - Exchange Team Blog. A few months Bruce Langworthy wrote an excellent article regarding some new recommendations for setting the Windows Disk Timeout value - This post got me thinking about Exchange and how we deal with I/O problems.
If you haven't read Bruce’s article, it explains that the default disk timeout of 60 seconds means that Windows will not report the hung I/O for 60 seconds and won’t retry the I/O for 8 minutes. 8 minutes is far too long to wait before retrying a hung IO, so Microsoft is releasing new guidance recommending changing the Windows Disk Timeout setting to a value that aligns with your storage architecture. To answer this question I approached some of our ESE developers to get their thoughts… this is what came from that discussion… Exchange Server 2010 SP1 Extensible Storage Engine Recovery on Hung IO So, what does this mean? Conclusion. NTFS File Growth. In my quest to better understand the interworking of how NTFS stores information on disk, I have been researching what happens to a file as it grows in size and complexity.
The reason I’m after this knowledge is so I can better troubleshoot certain storage issues. Recently, I realized that I’d stuffed my head with enough information to make a pretty good blog. Read along as I explain what I call ‘the four stages of file growth’. Before we can address file growth, we need to first look at how NTFS works under the covers.
Let’s start out with some basics. When NTFS stores a file, it starts by creating a small 1KB file record segment that we will call the base record. Every file starts like this, including the special hidden files such as $MFT, $LOGFILE, $VOLUME and so on. For today, we are just going to talk about some simple text files. Before going any farther, it is important to clear up a common misconception on what a file really is. Now let’s watch our file grow…. In review. Process Monitor and Registry via GP. Hi, Ned here. I’m a Technical Lead in Directory Services out of Charlotte, NC. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about a common customer question: how do I leverage group policy to deploy custom registry settings? I’ll be showing two ways to do this… the easier versus the harder.
Why would you ever want to do the harder? The Scenario You’re administering thousands of Vista workstations and their applications, and you spend a lot of your day connecting to them for troubleshooting and maintenance. Figuring out the registry entry It stands to reason that Vista’s Calculator has to store which mode it’s going to start in somewhere, and that this somewhere is probably the registry. We then start the calculator, and we switch it over to scientific mode. It’s doubtful the cryptography entries are anything but chaff, so let’s focus on this setting change for HKCU\Software\Calc\Layout. This takes us into the registry editor, where we see what actually got changed. The Easier Way 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Every Windows Sysadmin Need This!
Inside Microsoft, we maintain a repository of tools written by our engineers and technical staff. Many of the tools that are posted are very specific to Microsoft engineering— tools to help developers and testers better manage their project in our internal source control system, provide better visibility into our internal bug/issue tracking system, etc. Since these tools are very specific to the Microsoft environment, most of them don't get released externally. About eight months ago, I came across a tool in the repository called Remote Desktop Connection Manager ("RDCMan" for short) written by Julian Burger, one of our principal developers on the Windows Live Experiences team.
RDCMan is a central place where you can organize, group, and manage your various Remote Desktop connections. This is particularly useful for system administrators, developers, testers, and lab managers who maintain groups of computers and connect to them frequently. Figure 2: An organized RDCMan configuratoin.