Understanding Exchange 2010 Scalability Limits

Although evolved in comparison with its predecessor, Exchange Server 2010 does come with inherent limitations, which customers should be aware of. A new resource offered by Microsoft is designed to underline the scalability limitations of Exchange Server 2010 and Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2). The Exchange Scalability Limits worksheet, available for download free of charge, offers an insight into just how far customers will be able to push the product until they run into trouble.

“Exchange 2010 is new and different from its predecessors in that, unlike all previous versions of Exchange, Exchange 2010 is the first version designed specifically to run as an on-premises application, as a hosted service in the cloud, and as a combination of both (cross-premise). At 20 million mailboxes and growing, it's more important than ever that our understanding of the limits of Exchange be crisp,” Erin Bookey, Scalability, Performance and Load tools PM in Exchange, revealed.

Microsoft indicated that the documentation detailing the scalability limits of both Exchange 2007 SP2 and Exchange 2010 had been cooking for quite some time. The initial version of the Exchange Scale Limitations spreadsheet is currently up for grabs directly from the company via this link.

Customers will be able to find that the documentation offers an insight into a variety of areas including: organization and rules sizing, IRM-protected messages, secure channels, named properties, load balancing, network latency, etc., according to Bookey. What is important to note is the fact that the spreadsheet also offers, albeit just in some of the cases, guidance on how to overcome the limitations of Exchange Server. Microsoft has documented a few mitigations that can be applied by customers that run into problems with Exchange.

“Some limits can be caused by limits that are external to the application itself, while others can be inherent within the application. As a software engineering team, it is important for us to understand the scalability limits of the solution as a whole; this includes the limits of both external dependencies and internal code. Not only does this enable us to document and communicate this information to our customers, but it also helps us make better software. It provides us with a deeper understanding of our application within the most demanding environments,” Bookey added.

Exchange Server 2010 is available for download here.