At IT Forum 2005, the Exchange Server Group and Windows Enterprise Management Division made available the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 SLA Scorecard for Exchange - a free, downloadable solution which provides information to help IT managers better understand the capabilities of their Exchange infrastructure so they can feel confident in committing to SLA targets.

The solution provides an executive dashboard for measuring and trending service availability and traffic across multiple server roles in a Microsoft Exchange Server messaging environment, enabling IT managers to define desired service levels and the cause of service outages. The SLA Scorecard, using data collected from MOM 2005, enables customers to determine a baseline for their current Microsoft Exchange Server infrastructure, and then effortlessly deliver consistent metrics and measures reports. 

On Nov. 2nd, Microsoft updated the popular Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer tool (ExBPA version v 2.5) which is designed for administrators who want to determine the overall health of their Exchange servers and topology. The tool scans Exchange servers and identifies items that do not conform to Microsoft best practices. Key features of the updated ExBPA include automatic updates, minimal installation prerequisites and state-of-the-art expert system analysis.  

With e-mail at the forefront of corporate communications, the need for Exchange reporting and analysis has become paramount for corporate executives, I.T. directors and managers, Exchange administrators, and migration consultants alike. Understanding Microsoft Exchange usage and trends, modeling and justifying expenses, and forecasting operational requirements are fundamental to effective management of an Exchange environment. This necessitates metrics on service delivery, capacity, usage, and inventory from both technical and business perspectives in order to confirm operational efficiencies in use of technology to facilitate overall corporate objectives.Read more...

Recently, we have seen some performance problems on Exchange servers being caused by "desktop search" products that plug into the Outlook client and then index mailboxes and/or public folders for faster searching.
This does not mean that all desktop search products index mailboxes and/or public folders and all exchange performance problems will be related to Desktop search engines.

Couple of related points that we need to look into are:

Exchange Server can benefit from having basic disk partitions track-aligned. Diskpar.exe is used for aligning a partition at the storage level, which, if used to create the partition, can have a significant positive performance impact on the storage and is highly recommended. There are some basic definitions that we will need to understand before elaborate it.

• A partition is the container you create on an initialized disk to format and then for using.
• Multiple partitions can be created on a single physical disk, and each partition will function as a separate disk. However, the partition appears to be a separate disk, the total throughput of the physical disk is remaining intact. Meaning, if you create two partitions on each disk and use them equally, they will each effectively only have half the available I/O rate. This is a key point to note for capacity planning.

Exmon for the first time allows an Exchange administrator the ability to see in amazing detail the performance of an Exchange server.

Microsoft announced the availability of the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer v2.1.