The following are best practices from this chapter:
Begin capacity analysis and performance optimization sooner rather than later.
Create performance baselines in which to gauge the changing requirements and performance levels of Exchange Server 2003.
Establish SLAs and other policies that reflect the business expectations of the messaging environment.
Monitor only those counters that are pertinent to the server's configuration.
Always monitor the four common contributors to bottlenecks : memory, disk subsystem, processor, and network.
Run performance and stress tests in a lab environment prior to implementing in a production environment.
Establish regular maintenance routines, including those for offline maintenance tasks .
Set an alert for Event ID 9582 to proactively address any memory or virtual memory problems.
Use the /3GB /USERVA=3030 parameters in boot.ini for any Exchange Server 2003 server with 1GB of memory or more installed.
Keep Exchange Server 2003 database sizes in the 10 “20GB range whenever possible.
Use separate, hardware-based RAID 1 volumes for system files and transaction logs.
