Best practices for disk I/O performance BlackBerry Enterprise Server running on Microsoft Exchange 2010

Version: 5.0

Technical Note

Published: 2010-09-01 SWD-1299892-0901024646-001

Contents
1 Best practices for disk I/O performance when running the BlackBerry Enterprise Server on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010................................................................................................................................................................................... Overview: Best practices for disk I/O performance................................................................................................................... Disk I/O of the Microsoft Exchange messaging server.............................................................................................................. Writing information to the Microsoft Exchange database................................................................................................. Reading information from the Microsoft Exchange database.......................................................................................... Best practices for configuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.............................................................................................. Using multiple mail databases............................................................................................................................................. Distributing user accounts across mail databases and grouping user accounts with different profiles together..... Optimizing the checkpoint depth value for mail databases............................................................................................. Verifying that the Microsoft Exchange Server has enough physical memory available................................................ Legal notice...................................................................................................................................................................................... 2 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 7 7

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Best practices for disk I/O performance when running the BlackBerry Enterprise Server on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Best practices for disk I/O performance when running the BlackBerry Enterprise Server on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Overview: Best practices for disk I/O performance

The BlackBerry Enterprise Server manages the exchange of email messages and data between the Microsoft Exchange Server and BlackBerry devices. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server functions as a mail client; it accesses mailboxes on the Microsoft Exchange Server to save and retrieve email messages, and to update the properties of email messages (for example, it updates the status of an email message from unread to read). The BlackBerry Enterprise Server uses the database engine of the Microsoft Exchange Server when it accesses user mailboxes. The transactions that the BlackBerry Enterprise Server performs generate disk I/O on the Mailbox Server Role of the Microsoft Exchange Server. You must account for backup and restore requirements, storage capacity, and acceptable latencies when you consider the disk requirements of the Mailbox Server Role. You can customize how you configure the Microsoft Exchange Server to manage hardware resources and disk I/O performance more effectively. Research In Motion performed a series of performance benchmarking tests to develop best practices for how to configure the Microsoft Exchange Server to reduce the disk I/O requirements of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. You can collaborate with your organization's Microsoft Exchange administrators to implement the following best practices: Use multiple mail databases Distribute user accounts across mail databases and group user accounts that have different profiles together Optimize the value of the checkpoint depth for mail databases Verify that the Mailbox Server Role of the Microsoft Exchange Server has enough physical memory available

You can apply these best practices to use your organization's available hardware resources efficiently. For more information about the performance and scalability of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, visit http:// technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351197.aspx. For more information about mailbox server storage design, visit http:// technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346703.aspx.

Disk I/O of the Microsoft Exchange messaging server

The disk I/O of the Mailbox Server Role can be divided into two types, the database I/O and the transaction log I/O. The flow of email messages to and from the messaging server generates the database I/O. When the Mailbox Server Role writes information about email message transactions to log files, it generates transaction log I/O. The transaction log I/O consists of sequential writes and is very efficient when it is executed on high-performance storage systems. Storage-design activities typically

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Disk I/O of the Microsoft Exchange messaging server

focus on the random read/write operations operations of the messaging server database. If an administrator configures the messaging server correctly and runs the messaging server on a well-designed storage system, the administrator can maintain a reasonable amount of database I/O.

Writing information to the Microsoft Exchange database

The database storage engine of the Microsoft Exchange Server uses transaction logs and a lazy write algorithm to optimize the amount of disk I/O that is produced when the Mailbox Server Role commits changes to the messaging server database. When the BlackBerry Enterprise Server writes changes to the messaging server database, the messaging server writes transactions to the transaction logs at the same time as the changes are written to the database pages in memory. When the transaction logs reach a specific size which is known as the checkpoint depth, all of the database pages in memory that were marked as modified are flushed to the mail database disk and marked as committed. Each database page is committed to disk one time only, even if there are multiple updates to the database page in memory. The consolidated writes reduce the total number of writes to the database disk. The rate of transactions and the growth rate of the logs is a function of the number of BlackBerry device users and the activity that each user generates using their mail clients. For performance purposes, the email application on each user's computer and the email application on the BlackBerry device are considered to be separate mail clients. If one user uses multiple mail clients to connect to the Microsoft Exchange Server, there is an increase in the amount of data that is written to mailbox pages and logs. Microsoft Exchange Server writes separate transaction logs for each mail database. The checkpoint depth is a threshold value that is applied to each mail database. The value of the checkpoint depth is configured in Microsoft Active Directory as one of the properties of the mail database (specified as a number of bytes). The default value of the checkpoint depth is 20 MB; when the collective size of the transaction logs reaches 20 MB, any uncommitted data is flushed to disk.

Reading information from the Microsoft Exchange database

Email messages and indexes for sorting and retrieving email messages are stored in the messaging server cache. The larger the cache is, the more likely it is that the information retrieved by users is already in memory, which reduces the number of reads from the disk. As a 64-bit application, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 features a much larger cache than what was available in previous versions. Increasing the amount of physical memory available to the Microsoft Exchange Server and to the server cache decreases the disk read I/O for each user.

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Best practices for configuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Best practices for configuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Using multiple mail databases
You can distribute users across multiple mail databases to reduce disk I/O. If you decrease the number of users in each mail database, the checkpoint depth of each storage group is reached less frequently, which increases the disk I/O benefits of consolidating writes within the cache.

Changing the number of mail databases

Research In Motion ran a series of performance tests to demonstrate the relative impact of increasing the number of mail databases while keeping the number of user accounts on each server constant. The tests used one Microsoft Exchange Server with 1000 user accounts. In separate tests, the user accounts were distributed evenly across one mail database, two mail databases, and five mail databases. A checkpoint depth of 20 MB was used. The following chart displays the resulting differences in disk I/O compared to the baseline value of using one mail database:

The overall disk I/O differences were consistent with the changes in database writes because the number of database writes were significantly higher than the number of database reads. The disk I/O for database transfers, database writes, and database reads decreased as users were distributed across more mail databases.

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Best practices for configuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Distributing user accounts across mail databases and grouping user accounts with different profiles together
Microsoft Exchange administrators can group user accounts together based on the average number of email messages that users send and receive each day. These email message ranges are known as profiles. To simplify resource planning, administrators might decide to group user accounts with the same profile in a single mail database. This method is not advantageous because grouping users with the same profile could result in uneven disk I/O transactions across different mail databases, and mail databases with higher disk I/O transactions could reach a disk bottleneck. Some users might use more than one email application to access their Microsoft Exchange mailbox. For example, a user might keep Microsoft Outlook open throughout the workday to access their mailbox, and the user might also use their BlackBerry device throughout the workday to access their mailbox when they are not at their desk. A higher number of database transactions are generated when users use multiple clients to access their mailbox. It is a best practice to distribute user accounts with high-activity profiles and multi-client access points across mail databases that also contain low-activity profiles and users with single-client access points. This strategy permits you to maximize the benefits of the checkpoint depth and cache of a mail database.

Optimizing the checkpoint depth value for mail databases

You can increase the value of the checkpoint depth to increase the probability of writing transactions to a database page in memory that is uncommitted, instead of committing the data to the database disk. Increasing the checkpoint depth can reduce the number of writes to disk significantly. It is a best practice to configure the checkpoint depth to a value that is optimal for your organization's environment and system resources. You should consider creating additional mail databases to distribute users across, as this allows you to balance out disk transfers generated by users who use multiple mail clients to access their mailbox. Using additional mail databases increases the total checkpoint depth. You should also consider changing the checkpoint depth value if deployment constraints prevent you from distributing user accounts across multiple mail databases. For more information about changing the checkpoint depth value, visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/886298.

Changing the checkpoint depth

Research In Motion ran a series of performance tests to demonstrate the relative impact of changing the checkpoint depth of a mail database. The tests used one Microsoft Exchange Server with 1000 user accounts on a single mail database. In separate tests, the checkpoint depth of the mail database was changed from 20 MB to 40 MB, 60 MB, and 100 MB, respectively. The following chart displays the resulting differences in disk I/O compared to the baseline checkpoint depth of 20 MB:

Technical Note

Best practices for configuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

The overall disk I/O differences were consistent with the changes in database writes because the number of database writes was significantly higher than the number of database reads. The disk I/O for database transfers, database writes, and database reads decreased as the checkpoint depth was increased.

Changing the checkpoint depth in an environment with a database availability group

Research In Motion ran a series of performance tests to demonstrate the relative impact of changing the checkpoint depth of a mail database in a Microsoft Exchange environment that uses a database availability group. The tests used one Microsoft Exchange Server with 1000 user accounts on a single mail database. The checkpoint depth was changed from 100 MB to 200 MB. The following chart displays the resulting differences in disk I/O compared to the baseline checkpoint depth of 100 MB:

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Legal notice

The overall decrease in disk I/O was consistent with the decrease in database reads and database writes as the value of the checkpoint depth was increased.

Verifying that the Microsoft Exchange Server has enough physical memory available
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 uses a 64-bit architecture, so it is no longer constrained by the memory limitations of a 32bit architecture. For more information about planning memory configurations, visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ dd351197.aspx. Depending on the specific roles of the server and the user profile, the suggested practice from Microsoft is to install 4 to 16 GB of memory with an additional 3 to 30 MB of memory for each user account. If you do not follow this best practice, your organization's environment might consume a significant and unexpected amount of disk I/O and an increased number of disk throughput bottlenecks.

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