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BP1013 Best Practices for Enhancing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Data Protection and Availability 18
5 Test workload
The goal of the baseline workload was to simulate a regular corporate messaging activity during peak
hours and then to apply different data protection and recovery techniques to measure the efficiency
and impact on the local and network resources of each of them.
For the Microsoft Exchange mailbox database and users profile we applied the configuration reported
in Table 2.
Table 2 Microsoft Exchange Mailbox profiling
Microsoft Exchange Server profile
Number of simulated mailboxes/users
5000
Mailbox size
250MB
Mailboxes allocation
1250 mailboxes per mailbox database
Mailbox databases
4 databases
Two active and two passive databases on each node of
a two nodes DAG
User count per Mailbox database server
2500
Database + Logs volume
700GB each, one per mailbox database
Basic disk, GPT partition, default alignment
64KB allocation unit size
Accessed by drive letter
Capacity allocated
Database: 420GB each (average)
Logs: circular logging NOT enabled
1400 logs/hour per database at maximum load
Provisioned for up to 58 hours of continuous logs
generation (1 log = 1 MB)
Content Index: 200GB each database (average)
Exchange Search Indexer
Running
Exchange Maintenance
Enabled in background (24x7)
For additional information about Exchange Server 2010 storage configurations and best practices,
refer to Microsoft documentation:
Understanding Storage Configuration , available at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832792.aspx
5.1 Microsoft Load Generator considerations
Exchange Load Generator 2010 is a validation and stress tool able to generate client access workload
against an Exchange 2010/2007 test infrastructure. The tool can simulate the access patterns of
common client applications or protocols such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007/2003 (online or