I'm taking a shot in the dark here, but as long as CPU and memory are not being overly taxed, the user can get away with expanding his storage into an external array. Either a 7 or 14 drive bay would work well, 10K disks at 73.4 Gbytes per disk.
You can run the drive array as a striped set to give you the maximum i/o available. Transaction logs would go on the original drive array, after converting it to a two drive mirror set and reformatting it to FAT32. I would also break your users into two or three MDB's under one Storage Group. Online maintenance should run from midnight to 6 a.m. (or an hour or so before your start of business hours) and then run 24 hours per day on the weekend (assuming that you don't have a whole load of users on at that time). But this is just me. John H. Matteson, Jr. Systems Administrator/ITT Systems FOB Orgun-E Afghanistan DSN - 318 431 8001 VoSIP - (308) 431 - 0000 Iridium - 717.633.3823 "A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes." Woodrow Wilson -----Original Message----- From: Mark Milosavljevic [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 7:16 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Sluggish Performance Exchange 2003 Are there any guidelines I should be using in sizing server for 500 mailboxes /100 gig total stores - in particular the I/O subsystem? . About 70% of staff are connected via vpn and use cached mode. We are a Not For Profit so don't have too much money to spend. We have as a rule used HP in the past for most of our servers. -----Original Message----- From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, 13 February 2008 7:44 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Sluggish Performance Exchange 2003 Sounds to me like your I/O subsystem is slammed and needs to be upgraded. (Slammed is a technical term.) :-) The 1221 event log entries that should be spit out when online maintenance finishes - how much free space do you have in your database? Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -----Original Message----- From: Mark Milosavljevic [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 2:41 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Sluggish Performance Exchange 2003 The raid 5 is composed of 3 disks each 73.4GB Ultra 320 10K rpm. The on-line maintenance is happening daily from about 7 am completing next day around 3 AM Regards Mark -----Original Message----- From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, 13 February 2008 12:18 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Sluggish Performance Exchange 2003 How often is online maintenance completing? How many disks are in the RAID5 storage array? What speed? Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -----Original Message----- From: Mark Milosavljevic [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 1:16 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Sluggish Performance Exchange 2003 Stores are not large - 100 gig in total (raid array has 144 gig available for stores). Disk layout is operating system raid 1, stores raid 5 and logs single disk. On-line maintenance takes about 24 hours. Server is a IBM with a RAID 5I controller Mark -----Original Message----- From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 12 February 2008 10:37 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Sluggish Performance Exchange 2003 An average disk queue length of 10 is abysmal. Running a defrag will not help and may very well hurt. How large are your stores? What is the hardware of the disks? How often is online maintenance completing? Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -----Original Message----- From: Mark Milosavljevic [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 5:23 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Sluggish Performance Exchange 2003 Performance on our Exchange 2003 box has deteriorated and users are complaining of poor response in opening emails. The box is an IBM 2.4 Ghz, 4gig ram supporting 500 users. The software is windows 2003 enterprise. Running performance monitor gave disk queue length of around 10 on the stores volume - sometimes more. Running disk defrag utility on stores volume gave volume fragmentation as 49% and file fragmentation as 98%. My question is - can you use windows defrag utility to clean this up or is there a better third party utility to do the job or am I looking in the wrong area for the poor performance? ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
