Exchange Size Planning

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Ask the Perf Guy: Sizing Exchange 2013 Deployments

The Exchange Team

6 May 2013 7:00 AM

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Since the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Exchange 2013, you have been waiting for our sizing and capacity planning guidance. This is the first official release of our guidance in this area, and updates to our TechNet content will follow in a future milestone.

As we continue to learn more from our own internal deployments of Exchange 2013, as well as from customer feedback, you will see further updates to our sizing and capacity planning guidance in two forms: changes to the numbers mentioned in this document, as well as further guidance on specific areas not covered here. Let us know what you think we are missing and we will do our best to respond with better information over time.

First, some context

Historically, the Exchange Server product group has used various sources of data to produce sizing guidance. Typically, this data would come from scale tests run early in the product development cycle, and we would then fine-tune that guidance with observations from production deployments closer to final release. Production deployments have included Exchange Dogfood (our internal pre-release deployment that hosts the Exchange team and various other groups at Microsoft), Microsoft IT’s corporate Exchange deployment, and various early adopter programs.

For Exchange 2013, our guidance is primarily based on observations from the Exchange Dogfood deployment. Dogfood hosts some of the most demanding Exchange users at Microsoft, with extreme messaging profiles and many client sessions per user across multiple client types. Many users in the Dogfood deployment send and receive more than 500 messages per day, and typically have multiple Outlook clients and multiple mobile devices simultaneously connected and active. This allows our guidance to be somewhat conservative, taking into account additional...