Exchange performance

[anything I don't mind]

What do you think is the main factor in improving exchange performance, disk iops, network latency etc ?

What about mailbox size? I have a client with 100 users and some of the users have 20gb mailboxes and some of the secretaries have access to five mailboxes over 100mbit network lan to gigabit connected exchange. Would gigabit to the client and faster exchange disk iops make a big difference or should we look at reducing mailboxes size first?

I think that new esxi hosts should be a priority as well as deleting old emails completely as they are accessible via mimecast

 

[anything I don't mind]

We inherit the clients in a poor state and have to try and sort them out. You should pity us for having to deal with the bs. A lot of the problems are due to client boards just not wanting to cooperate with IT.

 

[anything I don't mind]

If you don't want to answer the question then don't even bother posting.

I asked a technical question of what people thought would offer the best performance boost. I didn't ask for assistance on how to deal with a client. If i had respect for you i might have been insulted by your comment.

 

[anything I don't mind]

It was just a general question, It was not meant to be only specific to the current environment.

What version of Exchange is it?
Exchange 2003 soon to be 2010
What hardware is it running on currently?
It is on a
ESX 3.5 on hp dl385 g2 with 16gb ram. There is three hosts which connect to a netapp 2050 over iscsi. There is 15 vms across the three hosts and 100 users access them during the day. There is a physical sql server and a physical file server for the DMS store. the vmstore is not under very heavy load but it is reaching max capacity in terms of performance. We are looking to upgrade the hosts soon to hp 385 g8
Are the DBs and logs on separate arrays?
yes
What clients are the users using?
outlook 2003 soon to be 2010
Are you using Outlook Anywhere?
no
How many items do the users have in their folders?
well mailboxes range from 5-20 gb with 100 users. Some users have 100000 items+ in their mailboxes but to boost performance we tend to encourage users to move emails out of their inbox and in to sub folders at the least, this improves performance for the inbox only.
What spec are their computers?
intel i3 with 3gb ram. hp 8100 sff running windows 7.


We plan to implement mailbox size limits when we move to 2010 and the client has agreed upon this policy but it just convincing the users that they need to delete several years worth of email from their outlook is problematic. I still think that upgrading the hosts should be a priority over moving to 2010.


I should add that the exchange 2003 is currently on windows 2003 32bit with only 3gb or vram allocated. The question is if we had a strict policy and lawyers actually listened to IT and everyone mailbox was capped at 5gb would the users notice any difference on the current hardware. Basically my boss is telling the client that if users had smaller mailboxes there oulook would be much faster. I have been saying to him that i wouldn't exactly say that because i think we won't see a drastic speed increase until we move to faster hardware. I just wanted to see what your thoughts on that were.

 

[anything I don't mind]

OK thanks. Either way we need to deal with the massive mailboxes but i was just not sure if we should do the hosts first, before exchange/office 2010 and reducing mailboxes. But after what you have said i think reducing mailboxes as a priority and moving to 2010 and then upgrading hosts will be ok.

 

[anything I don't mind]

We use mimecast which works as a spam filter, archive and even DR solution. But that means people have to a) learn how to use it b) go through the extra effort of not having it in their outlook. There is a mimecast outlook plugin but it conflicts with other addons and slows down outlook. The system runs ok though, it is not slow enough for me to moan about it. Since we put new desktop in i think it runs pretty fast, but they have to understand if they click on a sub folder with 20000 items in it and they have not clicked it on for a while. Outlook is going to take a few seconds to load the emails if cached exchange mode is not on. But you get some users who always moan. There is also internal politics about the problem. IT ends up having to go in to each mailbox and manually pst old mailboxes. But we can't do that during the day or it slows down exchange.