Essential Exchange

In yesterday's EMO (Exchange Messaging Outlook eZine, subscribe at http://www.slipstick.com/emo ) I had an article named It's All About The IOPS, Silly! which discussed the impact of RAID-1 and RAID-5 arrays on total IOPS calculations. However, space didn't allow me to talk about SANs (Storage...

In larger organizations, the overhead associated with backing up every server in an organization (where every server is already redundant in some way) can become onerous and expensive. In those types of organizations, with dedicated virtual servers for a specific feature or multiple pieces of physical...

It was pointed out to me, by a party that shall remain nameless, that I depended in today's earlier post Finding Disk Space Used By Exchange Version 2 , that I ASSumed that msExchCurrentServerRoles would never be higher than 64 and that that was a bad assumption on my part, for reasons that shall...

In July of 2006, I had a blog entry named Finding Disk Space Used By Exchange , and it was quite well received and it worked well for most people. However, it had a few issues: It doesn't work with Exchange Server 2007 because the streaming file was removed from Exchange If a Recovery Storage Group...

A question came up recently on a mailing list I hang around. A poster wrote: "I'm looking for a concise explanation of when/how the transaction logs are committed. Specifically, is there another way to force logs to be committed other than the backup or stopping the IS? (E2K3)" As with...

I and 4,000 MVPs from around the world have accumulated in Seattle/Redmond this week. Where do we all go? To the bar, of course! Last night, a few Exchange MVPs and the odd PowerShell MVP were sitting around discussing stuff I can't talk about here, when another MVP came to join us (who happens to...

Even though I get pretty hot under-the-collar sometimes when Microsoft removes for-free functionality (Exchange backups on Windows Server 2008, for example), there are some great tools that Microsoft provides for-free that are just as good as their for-pay alternatives - and more tightly integrated with...

Recently on a mailing list, several folks expressed some confusion about the scaling that Perfmon (Performance Monitor) does in its graphs and how it affects the data. The answer is: it doesn't. The scaling is used only to make the graph fit in the Perfmon window. The values contained in the Last...

So, "The Essential Exchange" is my front-end to my consulting business. I admit that marketing is not my strong suit. So far, I'm supporting myself on writing and people using my services from the communities I help support. But this week I'm meeting with an honest-to-gosh client who...

Over three years ago, I wrote my most popular (in terms of number of times it has been read) blog post ever: " Exchange Server 2003 and Domain Controllers - A Summary ." Since it was written in January of 2005, Exchange Server 2003 service pack 2 has been released, Windows Server 2003 service...