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BP1013 Best Practices for Enhancing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Data Protection and Availability 19
cached), POP, IMAP4, SMTP, ActiveSync, and Outlook Web App. Some key elements and
considerations about Microsoft Exchange LoadGen are:
• Requires a fully functional Microsoft Exchange deployment
• Requires, and provides, an ‘initialization’ step to create Active Directory user accounts and
mailboxes, and then populates the mailboxes according to the defined requirements
• Simulates user client tasks within a wide range: logon/logoff, browse calendar/contacts, create
tasks/appointments, send emails, read and process messages, download Outlook Address
Book (OAB), etc.
• Reports a high level pass/fail metric for each run (based on the number of the tasks planned to
be executed, tasks achieved, and length of the tasks queue)
• Exchange 2010 Content Index size is usually 5-10% of its own mailbox database. It is a known
behavior that the size of catalogs created upon mailbox databases built by LoadGen can grow
over the expected percentage statistic. The root cause for that is within the message mix
generation and consequent mailboxes population executed by the tool:
o LoadGen populates the mailbox databases from a predefined small set of emails
o Email content is an artificial Latin mix with few words concatenated
o Little variety in the attachments, which are mostly text based and searchable, is used.
Some real world attachments are just not searchable.
For the Microsoft Exchange LoadGen tool profile we used the configuration reported in Table 3.
Table 3 Exchange LoadGen profile
Microsoft Exchange LoadGen profiling
Number of simulated mailboxes
5000
Client access type
Outlook 2007 online
Client access profile
Heavy (20/80, 132 tasks per user day)
Simulation day length
8 hours
Simulation test length
Variable (from 1 hour up to over 8 hours)
For additional information about Microsoft Exchange LoadGen 2010, refer to Microsoft
documentation:
Tools for Performance and Scalability Evaluation , available at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335108.aspx