Maintaining Exchange Server | Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Delta Guide

As an Exchange administrator, the majority of your time will be spent maintaining your Exchange implementation. With Exchange 2000, this time was spent tuning Exchange servers and components, as well as working with memory utilization.

With the introduction of Exchange 2003, these tuning and maintenance tasks have been minimized. To start, the majority of the manual tuning settings you have used previously in Exchange 2003 have been incorporated into the product. This means that you do not have to manually configure these settings using the registry or other tools because they are now included in the product.

TUNING SETTINGS AND UPGRADES

Remember from Chapter 3, "Installation," that before you can perform an upgrade from Exchange 2000, you need to remove any of the manual tuning settings that you had applied to your Exchange implementation; otherwise, the installation might not work correctly.

Exchange 2003 now includes some enhancements to the way Exchange servers and components manage and utilize memory. The most significant improvement has been made to the way that memory is allocated. Exchange 2000 supported "creeping" memory usage, whereby an initial allocation of memory was made and, as more memory was required, this allocation slowly occupied more and more memory. This process could often put a drag on server resources and was not efficient for servers that had multiple applications running at the same time.

Exchange 2003 has a contiguous block of memory assigned, eliminating the need to "creep" up when more memory is required. In addition, Exchange 2003 scans your current configuration for any memory conflicts or configuration problems and writes an event to the Event Log on the server where the conflict or error occurs.

To find these memory-related errors, follow these steps:

From the Start menu, select Administrative Tools, Event Viewer.
Right-click on the Application node, select Properties, and click on the Filter tab.
Using the Event ID text box, enter an ID of 9665. Click OK to return to the Event Viewer, where your results should be filtered to show only the events that are related to memory configuration errors.
To print a list of events, you need to export this list to another file format. Right-click on the Application node and select Export List from the shortcut menu.
Use the drop-down list at the bottom of the File, Save dialog box to select either plain text or comma-separated values. Then enter the location and filename and click Save to save your Event Log to a file.
Use Notepad or Excel to open and print the list of events.

Several different conditions most notably when your server has a large amount of memory installed and has not been configured correctly to take advantage of this memory size generate this event. You can find more information about configuring Exchange for different scenarios in the Exchange 2003 Deployment Guide available at the Exchange Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/administration/).

TURN OFF MEMORY CONFIGURATION CHECK

If you have already configured your memory usage and want to turn off this configuration check, open the registry and locate the following node: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\ParametersSystem\. Then add a new key called Suppress Memory Configuration Notification and create a REG_DWORD value of 1. Doing so turns off the memory configuration check and eliminates the occurrence of 9665 events in the Event Log. This error will occur if any of the following is true:

The server is running Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and the SystemPages value in the registry is set outside the range of 24,000 31,000.
The server has 1GB of memory or more and does not have the /3GB switch.
The server is running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, has 1GB of memory or more, and the /3GB switch is set; however, the /USERVA setting is not present or is outside the range of 3,030 2,970.