Exchange maintenance?
I dunno, maybe I am barking up the wrong tree here. I'm in Orlando this week at the Exchange Connections Conference. Love the weather! I was at a session this morning and something really got my goat. Of course, this isn't an official Microsoft Conference or anything, but I attended a session this morning about Exchange Performance Tuning and the speaker made reference to several things that I disagree with.

1. A recommendation was made to go ahead and use the additional capability of mailbox stores and storage groups. Ok - I can see this making sense, but certainly not for everyone. This is the type of recommendation that can really throw some companies over the edge in terms of their server performance. I felt like this comment was unwarranted and irresponsible. Sure the capability exists to use multiple storage groups and multiple databases, but caution needs to be exercised when doing so, otherwise you may well end up with a server that performs worse than before. What am I talking about? Well, for starters, you need to have dedicated spindles for each set of transaction logs. There's more than one set, you say? Yup. Each new storage group has it's own set of Transaction logs. If you use all 4 available storage groups, and keep all the transaction logs on one volume, that would get pretty messy. With the type of audience that normally attends these types of conferences varying widely in level of experience, I doubt that everyone knew this. Not to mention that each additional storage group and each additional database increases the memory requirements to startup Exchange. On a properly built server, this isn't an issue, and of course every Exchange server is always properly built (smirk)

2. Another recommendation was made to fight for the right to be able to do Exchange maintenance. More specifically, being able to run offline defrag/compaction of the databases on a periodic basis. This I also did not agree with and had to make a concerted effort not to make a comment (I felt it would have been out of place in a large group like that). I have been asking around and I have not been able to find any documentation (as of yet) that truly shows me the performance gains from performing routine offline compaction of Exchange databases. Sure, it clears out the white space, but unless you have implemented mailbox limits or moved a ton of mailboxes off of the store, you are actually making Exchange work harder (IMHO)because it has to create new space for the growing database again instead of re-using the existing white space. This to me seems more costly than dealing with a bit of a fragmentation issue. I'd welcome to chance to see some actual numbers in terms of performance before/after, etc, but I suspect these numbers may vary widely depending on the server.

On a side note, I quite enjoyed the keynote last night from Mark Minasi. We all had quite a few chuckles. Dave Thomspon (Exchange VP at Microsoft) also spoke and shared some good material.

I'll blog again later after attending more sessions.
- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 12:32 PM 0 comments

 
Up and coming Mobile device
Some of my co-workers have the Handspring Treo 600 here, and can't wait for the new Treo 650 that is supposed to be out VERY soon. I can't blame them - the Treo 650 is supposed to have many enhanced features, included a better resolution (320x320) screen, Bluetooth capability, a higher res camera, among other things. It's a nice device, but it is still a bit large for my taste. I'm a subscriber to PC Magazine, and in one of their recent issues, they did a review of mobile devices. In the article, they had an insert with up and coming phones. The one that particularly caught my eye was the Motorola MPx. The style of this phone intrigues me. It is the first I have seen with the dual hinge styling, and it looks like it will have a fairly nice large screen with good resolution and will also include a full QWERTY keyboard. IIRC, it will be running Windows Mobile for Pocket PC and it also includes an SD/MMC slot. For a complete list of all of the features, check out the included link. The dual hinge is what could make or break this phone in my opinion. I haven't seen any information on which providers will be carrying this phone yet, but it should be available soon at a wireless store near you.
- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 9:54 AM 0 comments