Over the last several months, I have been involved in several critical customer escalations (what we refer to as critsits) for Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013. As a result of my involvement, I ha...
Updated Apr 27, 2020
Version 4.0
Blog Post
@Jetze -
1. We chose to release the performance guidance via the blog to enable us to communicate quicker and adopt changes at a faster pace (TechNet articles now link to it). In fact, we just updated the article the other day to add clarity with hyperthreading and
virtualization. We have taken an approach with this release to be more explicit with design recommendations (the Preferred Architecture), as opposed to how we provided guidance in previous releases. You can expect this to continue in the future, as well.
2. The calculator is and has always been a modeling tool to help determine the proper layout and configuration based on chosen design parameters. I've updated the above section to make this clearer, thanks for the feedback.
3. The reason I touched up software patching is because there are customers still running on really old releases. I know this because I had to deal with several of these customers, recently. In one instance, the outage was due to two code defects in the E2010
SP2 codebase that were corrected in SP3 and were publically documented. Adding further complication was that this customer was not even running the most current rollup release for the service pack (RU4 instead of RU8). In other words, this customer was running
a version of software from August 2012 in 2014. Their reasoning was that they wait one year after the release of a new service pack. Unfortunately, they couldn't even follow their own protocol (SP3 was released February 2013). This was simply poor operational
practice.
Ross