Hi all, My Exchange Server is getting slower and slower. The machine is 3 years old and it was a top end ML370G5 with 16GB RAM and 2 x 8 SAS disk 144GB array running RAID 5. The general GUI seems slow and I'm wondering if it's worth slapping some more RAM in it before doing any drastic. it's Windows 2003 64 and Exchange 2007 Enterprise. Any ideas out there?

The Exchange 2007 GUI is a little slow, and more RAM is unlikely to help with that. Are you just running the single array? If so that will be crippling the performance of the machine in general. Exchange is very storage heavy, and while throwing RAM at it can help a little, if the storage is badly configured then it will still struggle. Otherwise not really enough information about the system to make further recommendations. Try running the performance tool from the Toolbox and see what that flags. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources

I have two arrays, both 8x144GB SAS in RAID 5 with a Hot Spare. Some of my datasbases are quite big (200GB). I'll run the performance module and post back. Thanks.

It's essentially telling me my disk access is slow. I have no idea how to fix that then!

With RAID 5 arrays I am not surprised. That is the slowest version of RAID of them all. If you only have two arrays then the server was crippled from day 1. A large database doesn't help (although with correctly scaled storage large databases isn't an issue). Your only option would be to redesign the storage, possibly using another server to get the Exchange data off. From a pure performance point of view, lots of RAID 1 mirrors are the best. You would have one for the OS and apps, then a pair for each set of database and transaction logs. If you have 16 disks, then that gives you eight pairs available. One pair for the OS, one for recovery and six pairs for data. That would give you a capacity of about 600gb on those disks (100gb database per pair). There is little that you can do with what you have at the moment as storage is the bottleneck. RAM or processor isn't going to change that. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources

If you're interested there are a mailbox storage calculator that can be used for these purposes http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/15/432207.aspx http://msexchangeteam.com/files/default.aspx But RAID1 will work great like Simon suggested Jonas Andersson MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010 | MCITP: EMA 2007/2010 | MCSE/MCSA Blog: http://www.testlabs.se/blog