Greetings Exchange Community!
Today, I am pleased to announce the release of a major update to the Exchange Generate Message Profile script. This release primarily focuses on two enhancements.
The first enhancement is the script will now use multiple “threads” (currently in the form of PowerShell jobs with Runspaces under consideration for a future version) to collect data from multiple servers simultaneously. This should significantly speed up data collection in environments with a large number of servers in a site. A few notes on this:
- Each thread creates its own fully RBAC compliant connection to a local Exchange server (defaulting to itself). Because each session is using the RBAC compliant IIS based PowerShell proxy, the CPU utilization of the server running the script is not only increased by the multiple threads that are spawned, but also by the IIS service that they are each are connected to.
- When run on a full Exchange Server, the script defaults to using the number of threads equal to approximately ¼ of the CPU cores on the server. This helps ensure that by default the script does not use more than ~50% CPU resources on the server running the script, as it accounts for the CPU load of the threads (1/4 = 25%) and the load they place (another 25%) on the IIS service.
- When run on an system with just the Exchange Management tools loaded, the script default to using the number of threads equal to approximately ½ of the CPU cores of the system.
- The script will gracefully shut down any background jobs still running if CTRL-C is used to stop the script.
The second enhancement is regarding the script’s behavior of skipping the creation of a message profile for a site when a single server in it is unavailable or has data collection issues. This is still the default behavior of the script, but this behavior can now be overridden by specifying the minimum percentage of servers in a site that must be online and return data for a message profile to still be generated for that site. It is highly recommended to leave this at the default setting, but this requested feature will allow the script to provide even a slightly skewed message profile versus nothing when a small percentage of servers were unresponsive or have data collection issues.
For a complete list of all enhancements and bug fixes please review the Version History on the TechNet Gallery posting.
As always I welcome feedback through the TechNet Gallery posting.
Dan Sheehan
Senior Premier Field Engineer
