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BP1013 Best Practices for Enhancing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Data Protection and Availability 35
Figure 12 DAG seeding process data flow with Exchange replication over the network
Figure 13 and Figure 14 illustrate the CPU impact reported on both the source and target servers while
proceeding with the mailbox database seeding. We show that the
msexchangerepl.exe process
running the Exchange replication service is the service responsible for the CPU utilization impact. The
average processor utilization on the host servers was 15% on the source and 27% on the target, mostly
attributed to the seeding process activity.
The last quarter of the test duration reported a different behavioral pattern of the Exchange replication
service, with a sudden demand for increased processor cycles on the source and decreased on the
target host. The root cause of the change was the sequential copy activity embedded in a seeding
process (mailbox database and then content indexes). The seeding copy at that point switched from a
single large file copy (database) to a group of smaller files (indexes), owned and accessed by different
processes (
Information Store initially and then Search Indexer ). The additional short CPU load on the
target server immediately after the database file copy was due to the database mount activity, while
still proceeding with the index files transfer.
Note: Processor utilization counter values for all processes are calculated by Performance monitor
against one logical processor only. We have computed the real values against our case of four logical
processors to have a graphical comparison between total and per-process processor utilization.