Categories » ‘Microsoft Related’VMotion and Database Availability Groups (DAG)August 5th, 2010 by ScottOver the past few weeks I have been busy deploying Exchange 2010. Many of these deployments involved deploying Exchange 2010 on VMWare ESX environments. In a previous post I mentioned how Vmotion and Exchange 2010 DAGs was not supported. However, based on some testing I have changed my opinion of this approach. Perhaps it is just a fluke and I would be interested to hear what everyone out there is experiencing but here goes. When leveraging DAG on Exchange 2010 and the need to VMotion the server comes up there seems to be an issue with doing a migrate when the Exchange 2010 mailbox server is powered off for the Vmotion. I have seen this occur at two separate client sites. Power off the Mailbox Server, Migrate, DAG broken. Got it? Now, what I am seeing that if I leave the Passive node online and replicating the passive databases with the active node a live migrate seems to work just fine! I have tested this twice now (which is why I don’t know if it is a fluke or not) and both times migrating the passive node while powered on and replicating caused NO problems. I even went as far as to reboot the passive machine anticipating it to break, but nope, nothing! So, I’m going to challenge the community out there to try this if you can. Live migrate your passive VM Mailbox node and see what happens. If you can, power it off and migrate and see what happens. I seem to have the same occurrence when the VM is powered down and/or when the VM is powered on. Either way, from my testing it appears that if you migrate while the DAG member is online (keep in mind I didn’t have any active databases running on the node) it seems to successfully migrate without any problems! Let me know what your findings are, but this is great news! BES 5.0 SP2 – reduction to disk I/O on Exchange!July 30th, 2010 by ScottAs you may or may not know about 3 weeks ago RIM released SP2 for BES 5.0. Since I have some clients that run BES I thought I would read through the release notes for SP2 and came across an interesting bullet:
What does this mean? Well, my guess is it reduces the disk I/O impact on Exchange servers! As you may know in previous articles when building an Exchange environment you need to factor in an additional I/O on the disks of 3.64 (I like to round up to 4) for each BlackBerry Device in your organization. Meaning if you have 100 BlackBerry’s you can expect to have an extra demand of 400 IOPS on your Storage platform. Well, with this new fix with the “does not write updates for user statistics to mailboxes” I would have to assume that this would reduce that 3.64 number. I have heard a rumor that this number has been reduced to 1.85 IOPS per device. Considering I don’t have easy access to BES 5.0 SP2 I’m curious if anyone out there can confirm this? Please comment if you have tested and confirm! Exchange 2010 Client Access Server Workload SizingJune 14th, 2010 by ScottDuring TechEd 2010 in New Orleans I was able to attend a session dealing with the CAS workload Sizing. Microsoft put together a new chart to help with the different workloads that hit a CAS. The chart is based on the amount of workload that a typical CAS will see and the CPU Cost and Network Cost. I have attached a copy of the Chart that MS will be publishing to help with CAS sizing in the future. The chart is based on a 100 messages sent/received per day. The Chart: The chart gives a potential impact of using all Outlook using in the form of Outlook Anywhere, Outlook Web Application, Outlook, and ActiveSync. You can see that the chart includes IMAP and POP3 but those protocols are used for reading and not submitting mail. If you take a look at the chart you will notice that Outlook Anywhere and Outlook Web App are basically the same thus simplifying the sizing used for those roles. ActiveSync is actually an additional cost to Outlook. The logic here is that users will both be using Outlook and ActiveSync at the same time. Rarely do you see a user just using ActiveSync and not use Outlook at any given time during the day. (Actually I’m using Outlook right now and ActiveSync since my phone is automatically syncing) Another key take away from this session is the use of Windows 2008 R2. It was mentioned that the improvements to Windows 2008 R2’s rpcproxy service allows for the expansion of 15,000 Outlook Anywhere users on an 8-core CAS i.e. 2 sockets with 4 cores each (Recall my previous post?) Anyway, I felt this chart was very useful and since it hasn’t been published on TechNet yet I thought I would share. Enjoy! |
