1. Microsoft Exchange 2013 Sizing – An Information Behind the Guidance

2. About Me – Charles Derber
Have been working on Microsoft Messaging for ALMOST a Decade
Experienced on Planning / Implementing / Migrations / Designing / Consulting for Messaging Enterprise & Hosting Solutions
Also experienced on Multiple Messaging Vendor like Microsoft, IBM, Linux etc. but gained much expertise in “Exchange” due to exposure and interest on Microsoft Products
IT Professional User Group & I do

3. Agenda In the beginning – Road to Sizing
Architectural Changes Impact on sizing
Sizing Server role specific Deep drive - MBX / CAS / Active Directory
Exchange Roles Sizing – Storage / Networks / Virtualization / Hardware
Exchange 2013 Sizing tools
Considering Exchange 2013 Virtualization
Sizing – Demo

4. Sizing is both a “Science” & an “Art” form.

5. Guidance
Where it is coming from? – Pre-release environment!!
(Test labs / Dog Food( s are used in a way where it is not intended to use / Yes multi profile) / MSIT / Customer / Field work)
Resources
TechNet / MS Exchange Team Blog / Experts Blogs
Third Party Tools

6. What is not possible…?
Doesn’t cover everything because it cannot cover everything - but will provide some base line to start with 
Third party solution - BB / SMTP Relay / Applications
Third Partner dependent - Every one has different architect / functionality
Hardware support
Needs lab testing for your environment / consider failure domains - High Availability

8. Sizing Process
Read / Understand sizing, scalability, capacity guidance
/ Exchange Team Blog
Collect Data on existing deployment
User profiles (message sent + received per day)
Average message size

9. Sizing Process Define constraint No of database copies
Backup requirement
Storage architecture
Safety Net duration
Virtualization
Growth Plans
3rd Party Products

10. Sizing Process
4. Input profile data and design constraints into calculator tool
Always use latest calculator
5. Consider impact of various option provided by results via Calc.
Cost
Rebuilt times
Impact on High Availability

11. Sizing Process 6. Finalize Design
Storage calculator provides configuration scripts
Archive the calculator as documentation of the sizing process

12. Architectural Changes / Features
Exchange Server Roles
CAS Stateless – OWA / OAB / OA / EAS / EWS / Mail Flow
MBX – PF HA / Managed Store / IOPS / Safety Net & Others
Balanced use of Hardware – CPU / Memory / Disk

13. Minimum Systems Requirement
RAM
8GB – Mailbox or Multirole/Mailbox+CAS
4GB – CAS
CPU
Follow published OS guidelines
Disk Space
30GB

14. RAID vs JBOD, DAS vs SAN, Oh My!
Where is your personal/precious – JBOD
Google account is stored without RAID
Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service utilizes JBOD for storage
Microsoft's own internal deployment of Exchange 2010 has over 180,000 users on a JBOD infrastructure
Microsoft's TerraServer uses JBOD to store all of the data presented through that web site
Microsoft therefore recommends that if you are considering utilization of drives in a JBOD architecture that you do choose to do so with the 7.2K RPM SAS drives rather than SATA

15. What Storage should I choose ?
Even I can't tell you which storage architecture to choose
Microsoft supports SAN and DAS+RAID along with DAS+JBOD because no single storage architecture is right for every customer out there.
Unless you are in a situation where money is no object and will continue to be no object, you must seriously evaluate the storage solutions available to you

16. Sizing Exchange 2013 – Mailbox Role

17. Mailbox Role - Impact Increased resource usage
Cache sizing is different
New content indexing architecture impacts performance
By default UM enabled on MBX
Managed availability

18. Mailbox Role - Storage Mailbox Database, content indexes, log space
20% database overhead is now 0%
Content Index size is now 20% of EDB
Plus space for additional index set per volume (master merge)
Note that impact of space for master merge is reduced with multiple DBs per-volume

19. Mailbox Role – Storage Bandwidth
BDM in 2013 now consuming ~1MB/sec/DB copy, significant reduction from 2010

20. Mailbox Role – Transport Storage
Transport queue database takes advantage of ESE IO improvements to reduce IOPS
Microsoft production observations show ~1 DB IO per 75KB message
Low IOPS suggest that placing transport queue on system/install volume is now feasible in many scenarios
Significant transport throughput benefit seen from a protected write cache disk controller, set to 100% write cache
Transport capacity requirements include queue and Safety Net

21. Mailbox Role – IOPS
Exchange 2013 reduced IOPS requirements (~33% reduction compared to 2010)
Checkpoint depth is now consistent for all DB copies, so IOPS requirements are the same

22. Mailbox Role – CPU
Messages sent or received per mailbox per day
Mcycles per User, Active DB Copy or Standalone (MBX only)
Mcycles per User, Active DB Copy or Standalone (Multi-Role)
Mcycles per User, Passive DB Copy 50
2.13
2.66
0.69
100
4.25
5.31
1.37
150
6.38
7.97
2.06
200
8.50
10.63
2.74
250
13.28
3.43
300
12.75
15.94
4.11
350
14.88
18.59
4.80
400
17.00
21.25
5.48
450
19.13
23.91
6.17
500
26.56
6.85
Note: Baseline platform for CPU guidance changed in Mcycle requirements in 2010 and 2013 cannot be directly compared.

23. Mailbox Role – CPU
Hyperthreading (SMT) – Fantastic Technology increases CPU throughput – DONT USE IT…!
.Net framework allocates memory per core heaps
Significant impact to some Exchange service memory footprints

24. Mailbox Role – Memory
Memory on the Mailbox role sized based on ESE cache requirements
Cache requirements have remained constant from 2010
Overall cache sized to 25% of RAM, so guidance (based on total system memory) is 4x of 2010 cache sizing recommendation
Multi-role servers require additional memory for CAS based on user concurrency during worst-case failure
Messages sent or received per mailbox per day
Mailbox role memory per active mailbox (MB) 50 12
100 24
150 36
200 48
250 60
300 72
350 84
400 96
450
108
500
120

25. Mailbox Role – Memory Memory is allocated within heaps
.NET garbage collector has different “modes” which optimize for different allocation scenarios
Workstation GC
Uses common heap and cleanup process (can be concurrent or not)
Server GC
Allocates a heap and thread per logical proc
Server GC results in dramatically larger memory requirements at rest when SMT is enabled

26. Mailbox Role – Memory Best practice to install KB 2803754 or 2803755
(Windows Server 2008 R2)
(Windows Server 2012)
Reduces memory consumption in each store worker
No impact to sizing guidance
Memory is available for use by other processes
Decreases CPU spent in .NET garbage collector
Benefits Mailbox & multi-role
Enable by installing hotfix and setting regkey:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DisableRetStructPinning (REG_DWORD) = 1

27. Mailbox Role – Network
Seeding of multiple database per disk may require increased bandwidth between servers
Avoid bottlenecking on network
Plan for reseed operations, particularly in JBOD deployments
10GB Ethernet expected to become more common for Exchange infrastructure
Cost has dropped, many customers are standardizing on 10GB Ethernet in their datacenters

28. Mailbox Role – Unified Messaging
UM is sized using a concurrency model – you cannot have a dedicated server role as UM
Plan for a maximum of 100 concurrent calls per server
Note that UM in 2013 is a component of the Mailbox role, may need to adjust user distribution to optimize UM utilization/concurrency
Voic transcription is a heavy consumer of CPU
Plan for 1 CPU core per concurrent transcription If server is CPU starved, voic transcription may be skipped (voic delivered without transcription)

29. Sizing Exchange 2013 – CAS Role

30. CAS Role - Impact
Low resource utilization makes multi-role deployment (or virtualization) attractive
CAS is intelligent director of traffic work
Shift of processing resources from LB layer to CAS may negate new resource demand

31. CAS Role – Processor
CAS CPU is sized using a percentage of Mailbox CPU active user requirements
2013 CAS requires 25% of Mailbox active-user mcycles, down from 75% in 2010
Given significant reduction, ensure that enough CAS servers are deployed to handle failures and provide high availability

32. CAS Role – Memory
CAS memory is sized using a simple formula of 2GB + 2GB per-CPU core.
The per-core value assumes utilized CPU cores at peak (worst case failure), so this can get a little complicated
Per−server CAS memory=2GB+2GB× total user count CAS server count in worst case ×Mailbox mcycles per−user×0.25 mcycles per−core

33. Kemp Hardware Load Balancer & MS Exchange

34. Why Hardware Load Balancer…?
Microsoft Recommends
Service Aware, Pre-auth, SSO for Exchange & Lync
Evenly distributes load(Http/Mapi{Exchange 2010}/Https) between CAS servers
CA-FE now a stateless proxy server
SSL Acceleration & Reverse Proxy
Site HA & Geo Auto-failover
“Kemp HLB” is Microsoft Certified & Few others too!!!
Engineered especially for Microsoft Exchange & Lync
Lync / Application servers load balances too not limited to Exchange
Play around with Trial Virtual Load Balancer from Kemp to experience the functionality and its features.

35. Active Directory
Recommend deploying 1 AD GC core for every 8 Mailbox cores handling active load (assuming 64-bit GCs)
Size memory such that the entire NTDS.DIT can be contained within RAM for optimal query performance

36. Exchange 2013 Diagnostic & Perfmon
Logs:
Microsoft\Exchange Server \V15\Logging\Diagnostics\DailyPerformanceLogs folder
Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\Diagnostics\PerformanceLogsToBeProcessed
MS Exchange Health Management Service
Works towards assessing the health of Exchange components – OWA / EAS / EWS / ECP
It also captures information about activities such as the Calendar Repair Assistant, Mailbox Assistants, Mailbox Replication service, Migration service, OAB generation, and so on – V15\Logging root

37. Exchange 2013 Diagnostic & Perfmon
Most of the logs generated in CSV which are helpful in troubleshooting issues – at times root cause.
It fills the Exchange drive when not monitored – use data collector set to create resource policy and delete or follow Removing Old Exchange 2013 Log Files
Diagnostic logging – 70 New Added & 81 Old Removed
Removal of events for Public Folders and the addition of Front End Transport server events seem to be the biggest change. The ExchangeSA\OALGenerator one, commonly used to troubleshoot Offline Address Book issues, has been removed as well

38. Exchange 2013 - Sizing Tools

39. Sizing Tools – Exchange Role Calculator
Role Requirements Calculator turns published sizing guidance into a modeling tool
Try out various failure scenarios
Understand the impact of different hardware & storage choices
Provides scripts for DAG, database & copy creation
Many new features
CAS sizing
Transport storage sizing
Multiple databases per-volume (JBOD) support
High availability architecture improvements

40. Sizing Tools – Exchange Role Calculator

41. Sizing Tools – Exchange Profile Analyzer
Helps administrators collect estimated statistical information from a single mailbox store or across an Exchange Server organization
Can only be run on Exchange 2003(SP2) & 2007
Exchange View-Only Administrator permission to run
Run during non-business hours to avoid performance issues(on CAS) if any
Improve capacity planning method

42. Sizing Tools – Exchange Profile Analyzer

43. Sizing Tools – Collectlogs.vbs
Calculate Exchange transaction logs generated for each hour in the day
A simple VBS script that will collect all files in a folder and output it to a log file
Use Task Scheduler to execute this script at certain intervals in the day (e.g. every 15 minutes)

44. Sizing Tools – EmailStatistics.ps1
Script parses messaging tracking logs of your Exchange Servers and then tabulates the information into a CSV file
Demo
Messages Received per Mailbox Per Day = Received Total
Messages Sent per Mailbox Per Day = Sent Unique Total
Average Message Size = Average of Received MB Total & Sent Unique MB Total

45. Sizing Tools – Processor Query Tool
Quickly look up SPECint benchmark for a particular processor type
Takes average across multiple vendor submissions
Provides specific value to insert into Role Requirements Calculator

46. Sizing Tools – Jetstress 2013
Jetstress 2013 released March 2013
Validates that the physical deployment is capable of meeting specific performance requirements
Validates that the storage design is capable of meeting specific performance requirements
Finds weak components prior to deploying in production
Proves storage and I/O stability

47. Sizing Tools – Jetstress 2013
Jetstress is dumb tool that is used worldwide by thousands of Exchange professionals
When the Jetstress test reports a failure, Jetstress has not failed

48. Sizing Tools – Exchange Client Bandwidth Calculator
This Calculator has been designed to profile the network bandwidth requirements of both Exchange on-premises and Exchange Online (Office 365) workloads.
Hub site consolidation planning
Exchange service externalisation planning
Cloud requirements planning for Exchange Online (Office 365)
Demo

49. Exchange 2013 – Virtualization Sizing
Sizing methods for Exchange 2013 for physical and virtual hardware is the same
However you need to consider the impact of a shared virtual infrastructure
~10% for Hyper-V (follow vendors guidance for other hypervisors)
Co-locating Exchange with other virtual machines and workloads
Use resource reservation options to ensure that Exchange gets what it needs

50. Exchange 2013 – Virtualization Supportability
Windows Server 2008 R2
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2012
Hyper-V Server 2012
Third-party hypervisors (SVVP)
Exchange Roles
Both Exchange 2013 roles supported for virtualization
Live migration & Host based clustering is supported

51. Exchange 2013 – Not Supported
Dynamic Memory
Memory over commit / CPU over subscription
Hyper V snapshots
Differencing / delta disk
Apps on the parent OS

52. Exchange 2013 – Not Supported
Hyper-V replica
Replica provides DR for “any” VM via log shipping to a remote hypervisor
Use Data Availability (DAG) to obtain better HA & DR with Exchange 2010 & 2013
Replica makes sense for apps that don’t have DR capability built-in to the product
Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, AWS or similar

53. Exchange 2013 – Dynamic Memory Impact

54. Questions…?