Worst Practice #2: Leave "IOPS" for the consultant

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Worst Practice #2: Leave "IOPS" for the consultant

David Sengupta
If you're facing Exchange performance issues, ignoring IOPS (read from disk + write to disk operations) is one of the worst things you can do. The days of being concerned with CPU or memory bottlenecks are mostly gone for Exchange administrators. Now, disk throughput is the No. 1 factor you need to think about.

If you don't know what IOPS (a.k.a. "IO/sec" or "I/Os per second") means, you really need to do some reading on disk latency and how this affects disk throughput relative to your Exchange servers. This applies to pretty much any Exchange administrator, but becomes a real concern if you're:

  • Involved in purchasing, provisioning or building a new Exchange server.

  • In an environment where Outlook 2000/2003 end users frequently get "RPC Cancel Requests."

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  • (They're those pesky pop-ups that say something like "Outlook is retrieving data from the Microsoft Exchange Server <servername>. You can cancel the request or minimize this message to the Windows taskbar until Outlook closes the message automatically.")

Some good places to start reading include:

  • Nicole Allen's articles on You Had Me At EHLO, the Microsoft Exchange team's blog. (Nicole works for Microsoft and is a team lead on the Exchange Server performance analyst team.)

  • Chapter 4, "Tuning Exchange Performance" (specifically the section on "Disk Subsystem" pp. 45ff) of the Microsoft Exchange Server Performance and Scalability Guide.


Top 10 Exchange performance worst practices

 Home: Introduction
 #1: Treat "high availability" as a future project
 #2: Leave "IOPS" for the consultant
 #3: Use identical configuration for all Exchange Server roles
 #4: Encourage users to keep everything in their Inboxes
 #5: Schedule backups and system maintenance during peak usage
 #6: Throttle the RAM available to Exchange
 #7: Virus scan and back up the M drive
 #8: Ignore client configuration, type and usage
 #9: Don't use change control
 #10: Ignore management tools

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:   
David Sengupta, Exchange expert
David Sengupta is a Product Manager in the Windows Management group at Quest Software. He has also been a Microsoft MVP in the Exchange Server category for six consecutive years. Sengupta has contributed to various Exchange and Windows books, magazines and white papers from a number of publishers. He also frequently represents Microsoft on staff at Ask the Experts, Microsoft Experts Area and Peer Talk at conferences such as MEC and TechEd. David has an M.T.S. from Tyndale Seminary, Canada, a B.Sc. from University of Ottawa, Canada and MCSE (Messaging) and CCA certifications. David runs a blog on Microsoft Exchange and e-mail compliance issues at http://p0stmaster.blogspot.com and can be reached at mailman@quest.com.
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