Microsoft Exchange 2010 – Problems & Solutions

Listed below are some of the problems customers have faced, and the solutions provided by Exchange 2010.

Our mailboxes keep growing organically, which has caused our time restore time for database and mailboxes to break SLA – and our storage growth is costing us a fortune.

With the adoption of Disaster Availability Groups (DAG), Microsoft Exchange 2010 can provide mailbox high availability with no need for a SAN. Each Exchange server in the DAG group can use DAS. This in turn has a lower cost on storage and with sufficient DAG member no need to actually backup databases.

We have noticed that our Database/mailbox maintenance window cannot complete all the tasks within the window. And when we move mailboxes for offline database maintenance it disrupts our users.

Exchange 2010 no longer only processes database and mailbox retention policies during a predefined schedule, but continuously, 24/7, during low system usage. Mailbox moves are now performed online and users are neither aware of nor disrupted by it.

Outlook users wait for searches to respond with “Outlook is retrieving data from the Exchange server”. Or when browsing between folders with a large amount of items they receive a similar dialog.

The main cause of this is slow data retrieval from the database. Most people build their Exchange environments with the recommended memory or CPU, but compromise on the storage due to cost. The benefit that Exchange 2010 offers over 2007 and 2003 in read/write ratios are:

2003 = >2:1

2007 = >1:1

2010 = >2:3

Exchange 2010 achieves a 70% reduction in IOPs over 2007, and even more compared to 2003. This is partly achieved by the use of 64bit architecture and larger mailbox cache allocations. The result is faster searches and mailbox access with lower CPU and disk IO.

Our IT department finds we have a high overhead for users asking to be added or moved from distribution groups. Also HR keeps requesting we update user information.

Exchange 2010 now provides end users with the ability to administer their own personal information, along with being able to remove themselves from open distribution groups. This is achieved via the new ECP feature.

Our company would like to take advantage of the low cost Office 365 cloud based solution for our many remote workers; but we want to keep an internal Exchange infrastructure.

Once again, since Exchange 2010, SP1 comes to the rescue. You can now manage and extend your Exchange internal infrastructure into the Office 365 cloud while maintaining an on-premises presence via the Exchange management console.

Written by: PaulB