Exchange Team got a new Intern: New Exchange Tools

Either they got a new intern or someone had a very productive month. There are new (or updated) tools for Exchange available and there goes my weekend. I think of particular interest to a lot of you would be the performance troubleshooting tool as I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to walk people through setting up counters by hand to find bottlenecks. The second one on the list would be the Jet Stress tool, especially for you folks looking to bump up your SBS/Exchange Standard stores to 75GB (please, for the love of god, don’t go all the way up to 75GB..30, 40, 50 – its configurable you know.) More on all this when I get a chance to play with them, in the meantime get your download on!

Exchange Server Management Pack for MOM 2005
The Exchange Server Management Pack includes rules and scripts to track performance, availability, and reliability of Exchange components, such as Internet-related services, Extensible Storage Engine, System Attendant, Microsoft Exchange Information Store service, and SMTP.
This management pack not only validates the availability of communication services but also sends test e-mail to verify operations and measures actual delivery times.
The Exchange Management Pack Configuration Wizard provides a graphical user interface to configure Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 Management Packs, including test mailboxes, message tracking, and monitoring services.
The Exchange Server Management Pack Guide for MOM 2005 explains how to use the Exchange Management Pack to monitor and maintain messaging resources. You can download the management pack guide from the Microsoft Web site

Exchange Server Public Folder DAV-based Administration Tool
Use the Exchange Server Public Folder Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV)-based Administration tool (PFDAVAdmin) to perform various management tasks related to public folders and mailboxes. The tool checks the permissions status of each public and mailbox folder and corrects any problems found. The ability to bulk export/import the permissions and replica lists make this tool invaluable in achieving greater productivity in managing public folders. The program can also reports content information of each public folder and mailbox folder such as the number of items in each folder, size of folder and most recent modification date of any item in the folder.

Exchange Server Management Pack Configuration Wizard
Provides a graphical user interface to configure Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 Management Pack, including test mailboxes, message tracking, and monitoring services.

Exchange Server Jetstress Tool
Use Jetstress to verify the performance and stability of a disk subsystem prior to putting an Exchange server into production. Jetstress helps verify disk performance by simulating Exchange disk Input/Output (I/O) load. Specifically, Jetstress simulates the Exchange database and log file loads produced by a specific number of users. You use Performance Monitor, Event Viewer, and ESEUTIL in conjunction with Jetstress to verify that your disk subsystem meets or exceeds the performance criteria you establish. After a successful completion of the Jetstress Disk Performance and Stress Tests in a non-production environment, you will have ensured that your Exchange 2003 disk subsystem is adequately sized (in terms of performance criteria you establish) for the user count and user profiles you have established. It is highly recommended that the Jetstress user read through the tool documentation before using the tool.

Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer Tool v1.0
The Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer programmatically collects configuration data, performance counters and live tracing information from an Exchange server. The tool analyzes each subsystem to determine individual bottlenecks, then aggregates the information to provide root cause analysis.

Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Analyzer Tool v1.0
The Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Analyzer programmatically collects configuration data and header information from databases and transaction log files. The tool analyzes all headers and creates a detailed list of instructions explaining what the problem is, and how to resolve it.

Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool v2.5
The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer programmatically collects settings and values from data repositories such as Active Directory, registry, metabase and performance monitor. Once collected, a set of comprehensive ‘best practice’ rules are applied to the topology.
Administrators running this tool will get a detailed report listing the recommendations that can be made to the environment to achieve greater performance, scalability and uptime.