ESG Lab Review: HP P4000: Affordable, Scalable, Reliable Storage Microsoft Exchange Scalability


ESG Lab validated the enterprise-class performance capability of the P4000 SAN architecture in a highly consolidated Microsoft Exchange environment via an audit of recently publishedMicrosoft ESRP 2.1 results. The Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) is a Microsoft program designed to facilitate third party storage testing and solution publishing for Exchange Server. ESRP version 2.1 focuses on Exchange 2007. The program is a combination of a storage testing harness (Jetstress) and publishing guidelines for Microsoft Gold Certified and Storage OEM Partners. The Jetstress harness is a lightweight tool ideally suited for predicting storage performance in a Microsoft Exchange environment. It uses the jet engine database that Microsoft Exchange uses internally.


Manufacturers use the ESRP framework to test storage solutions and then submit results to Microsoft for review.


Approved solution results are posted on the Microsoft Exchange ESRP website. ESRP is different from standard IO benchmarking suites in two important ways: first, ESRP employs the Jetstress utility to create real exchange traffic that runs against real Exchange databases exactly as in the real world. Second, the testing is designed to measure both the performance and reliability of a given solution. The performance test runs for two hours while the reliability test runs for 24 hours. Microsoft makes it quite clear that these tests should not be used for performance comparisons, but in practice, end-users routinely look to these tests to gauge how well a given storage solution will perform in an Exchange environment.


The configuration used by HP and approved by Microsoft during ESRP testing is summarized in Figure 4. Microsoft Exchange servers running on 19 HP BL460c blade servers were used to test 152,000 Exchange mailboxes being served by a single pool of storage spanning 15 HP two-node P4500 SAS Virtualization SANs. The P4500 SAS Virtualization SAN with two SAN nodes and 24 SAS disks was selected by HP as the building block of the ESRP test bed because it is one of the most popular models in the P4000 SAN portfolio.


Figure 4. An ESRP Test Bed for 152,000 Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes


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The test bed was configured to support 152,000 Microsoft Exchange 2007 mailboxes as follows:


 15 HP P4500 SAS Virtualization SANs with 30 nodes and 360 disks in total.  19 active Exchange servers  8,000 users per Exchange server


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