Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.022
Tuning Considerations
The efficiency and capacity of Microsoft Exchange 2000 depends on the administrator’s
choices of server and storage hardware, and on the installation’s topology. These should be
chosen based on expected types and levels of usage. Exchange can be made more efficient
through changes to various registry settings on the Exchange computer.
There are three main types of tuning parameters:
◆Those with fixed optimal values (or values that can be treated as such)
◆Those that can be dynamically tuned by the software
◆Those that must be manually tuned (using setup, the exchange system manager, the
registry, and the Active Directory Services Interface Edit tool ADSIEdit)
Some parameters may need to be manually tuned for the following reasons:
◆Hardware or Exchange configuration information may be needed and this information
cannot or will not be obtained dynamically.
◆Server load information may also be required; this cannot be obtained dynamically
either.
Upgrading from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000
When Exchange 5.5 is upgraded to Exchange 2000, some registry keys altered by PerfWiz
retain their PerfWiz values, some do not, and some keys no longer appear in the registry
or they appear in a different location. This means that there might be significant differ-
ences between an Exchange 2000 Server that has been upgraded from Exchange 5.5 and
one that is a new installation, installed on new hardware. Because there are significant
performance improvements with Exchange 2000, and because optimizations do not
necessarily transfer from Exchange 5.5, it is best to start from scratch in evaluating the
optimization of Exchange 2000. It is useful in this process to know your Exchange 5.5
settings before upgrading to Exchange 2000. The text file WINNT\System32\perfopt.log
provides a record of those registry keys and disk assignments changed by PerfWiz.
Tuning the Message Transfer Agent (MTA)
As mentioned earlier, Exchange 2000 does not include a Performance Optimization
wizard, mainly because the majority of Exchange 2000 components are self-tuning.
However, when the MTA is installed, its tuning state reflects that of an Exchange 5.5
computer that has never been performance optimized.
In scenarios where an organization only has servers running Exchange 2000, the MTA
does not perform any processing, and so does not need to be performance tuned. However,
when your servers co-exist with X.400-based messaging systems and other foreign systems
(such as Lotus cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise, and Microsoft Mail) the MTA
might be used heavily and you should consider tuning the MTA registry parameters. You
will also need to tune the MTA if there is substantial co-existence with Exchange 5.5