Salty Extools Goodness
Here are some nifty Exchange Server 2003 migration planning/perf optimization planning tools for you,a nd check out the link at the bottom of this post to the new tools newsgroup:
ExBPA 1.1 programmatically collects settings and values from data repositories such as Active Directory, registry, metabase and perfmon. Next, comprehensive ‘best practice’ rules are applied to the topology, yielding a detailed report with recommendations you can use to boost performance, scalability and uptime. Run before you start a test with Jetstress, Loadsim, ESP in your test lab, and before you go “live” in production.
Jetstress helps you stress-test your pre-production disk performance by simulating Exchange disk Input/Output (I/O) load. Specifically, Jetstress simulates the Exchange database and log file loads produced by a specific number of users. You use Performance Monitor, Event Viewer, and ESEUTIL in conjunction with Jetstress to verify that your disk subsystem meets or exceeds the performance criteria you establish.
Run Jetstress if you are concerned about your storage subsystem, or if you only need to size for I/O capacity.
Loadsim lets you test your design assumptions by simulating MAPI client load. Loadsim can reproduce many different types of user load over different transports. For example, testing public folder access over RPC/HTTP.
ESP lets you sim a wide variety of protocols and loads. You can run modules concurrently from multiple hosts, thereby more realistically simulating physically separate client machines. There is no limit to the number of computers on your network that can host ESP modules. Run Loadsim or ESP if you need to evaluate the effect of 3rd-party solutions on an Exchange environment or evaluate client experience.
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