Get your new Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculators

[The_Exchange_Team]

Today, we updated both the Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculators.

For the Exchange 2007 calculator, the changes were minor (bug fixes essentially).  Head on over to the Updates Tracking page to see what is changed and/or download the revised version. 

As for the Exchange 2010 calculator, well as usual, there have been a number of bug fixes (mostly related to those pesky active copies after a server failure formulas); however, those fixes are not the only changes.  Over the past several years, many of you have pummeled me to add additional functionality, but I resisted, but as the Borg say, resistance is futile and I finally gave in.  I won’t give it away here though, you will have to delve into the calculator to figure out what improvement I’ve made.  Head on over to the Updates Tracking page to see what is changed and/or download the revised version.  The main article has also been updated.

- Ross Smith IV

[#2]

You'll need to update it again for SP1 soon.

[#3]

Brilliant!
Thanks Ross.
will there be significant changes on the ratios and minimum specs when SP1 released?

[#4]

Nice work, Ross. We pulled a copy down at a customer site yesterday to walk them through it and were delighted to see it had been updated moments before. :)

[#5]

All,

We found a minor issue in one of the bug fixes in both calculators, so we have released v7.8 and v17.6, respectively.  Please download the latest versions.

Ross

[#6]

All,

Two Questions - one on this calculator, and one on JetStress

(Question 1)  JetStress 2010 Beta (Exchange Perf) - Number of Mailboxes  

(feedback on the Jetstress 2010 post is request, but not allowed, sorry for posting here)

When specifying the "number of mailboxes" in an Exchange 2010 performance test, what should that number be?  

Do you enter the "total mailboxes per server", or the "mailboxes per database on that server".    The Jetstress Help file is unclear on this, as well as online help, and various postings searched on JetStress 2010.

It seems that JetStress 2010 multiplies the "number of mailboxes" (ex: 2,125)  by project IOPS (ex: 0.2) and expects 425 IOPS "per database LUN" from what I observed in the test run.   How does that input translate to load distributed in the test?

I'm guessing getting this question wrong is a complete rerun of the test scenario - because target IOPS is wrong, latencies will be higher because the load per db was wrong... so run the tests all over again?

(Question 2)  Can we get a writeup on the links between the info in the E2010 Mailbox Sizing calculator, and JetStress 2010?

Would like ability to take sizing calculator report and translate that into an XML file to feed to JetStress 2010 on an E2010 server for test run.  That way, what I projected in calculator estimates and build for production can then be accurately tested and validated.  [with caveats to storage diffs, etc]

These tests take a LONG time to run.  Signing up for a 4 hour maibox perf run on 8 servers could take 10 to 14 hours total between prep, setup, shutdown, cleanup and return to service.  

Thanks

[#7]

Hi All,

I have a bit of a strange question re: 2010 / SP1, and I hope you can help.
Our Exchange Org is administarted by serveral admins across 2 countries, currently the admins in country (A) are looking at going to Exchange 2010 (at some stage in the next few months, currently 2003) and they want to pre-prep the schema / domain before they go, that’s fine with me, question that was asked is, I (Country B) want to go to SP3 for Exchange 2007 (we are currently on Exchange 2007 SP1, we won’t be going to Exchange 2010 for a while yet), does the Exchange 2010 schema backwardly include all the schema updates for Exchange 2007 (SP3)?

Or will I have to run this (schema and domain prep) again to get the Exchange 2007 SP3 schema? For me, the way I want to do it is run SP3 ( which includes the 2010 schema) and then it’s done for both versions but hey I’m just a pawn in the whole scheme of things.

Any help would be great (hope the above makes sense).