LoadSIM is a tool that allows you to mimic stress
conditions on an Exchange 2000 server. You set the program criteria up
to be able to mimic a users (medium, heavy or MM2) performing daily e-mail
tasks, journaling, Public Folder requests, etc. This tool is very
helpful in allowing you to see performance data from an Exchange 2000, and
enable you to determine how many additional third-party applications (ie:
monitoring, backup, anti-virus) can run as well as help you understand the
minimum and maximum capacity loads that can be placed on an Exchange 2000
server. What is different from the LoadSIM version for Exchange 5.5 and
Exchange 2000, is that the 2000 build does not require you to run the tool
directly off the server, which would skew your performance results. You
are now able to run one or multiple load conditions on several workstations
and hit one server.When utilizing the
Resource kit tool for Exchange called LoadSIM, be aware that you need to use a
certain Outlook client level to create the Outlook profile and run the tool
against. In our testing in the labs, our configurations were as follows:
- Exchange 2000 SP3 server, windows 2000 SP2,
clustered configuration (2 servers 1 @ capacity of 572 users, 2nd server
capacity @ 2,000 users)
- Clients were Windows 2000 Professional with
Office XP installed (Outlook build was 2002)
Condition 1:
We ran the simulator against the 572 build
server, with a simulation of 580 users. The load ran fine in 3 1/2 hours
total.
Condition 2:
We went to re-run the simulator against the
same servers and got the following error message on the LoadSim client:
"ERROR: Openstore "Public folder": Error:
MAPI_E_FAILONEPROVIDER. The Microsoft Exchange server computer is not
available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange server
computer is down for maintenance.
The simulation failed, we were never able to
run this topology again. We tried going to another workstation with the same
workstation configuration, and tried to run the simulation against the same
server, it would not run. We could get the topology built and the
initialization built, but each time we went to run the simulation the program
would log on about 64 clients, pause for about 2 minutes, and then produce the
above error multiple times before finally stopping the simulation.
Condition 3:
We went to another workstation ran simulation
again, against a different server set. Condition 1 was successful, Condition
2 failed again.
Reported this to Microsoft, took a couple of
days to get supported because of the situation that his problem is occurring
on a tool from the Resource kit. Because it's part of the kit, and not part
of the product code, support is low priority.
Discovery and Solution:
You can not use the Outlook 2002 code which is
part of the Office XP installation on a Microsoft Professional workstation and
run LoadSim. The Outlook 2002 client and LoadSim are trying to share the same
MAPI*.dll's, hence locking the memory space from being used by any other
program following, such as a second run of Loadsim from running in that memory
space.
The solution recommended by Microsoft were one
of the following steps:
A good discussion of the MAPI issue will start
with the following article.
266418.KB.EN-US XCCC: Microsoft Does Not
Recommend Installing Exchange 2000 Server and
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;266418
Note: That is why the recommendation to
NOT put the O2k client on an E2k server. In Exchange 5.5, the LoadSim tool
was run directly off the server. Beware - some of your third party tools
require a MAPI client be installed physically on the Exchange server in order
to do MAPI calls of error reporting type messages back to a console.
We did not go in and tweek the registry on
these systems since other testing groups were utilizing the workstations for
their testing. We did downgrade the Outlook client on the W2K Professional
workstation to Outlook 2000 and ran multiple tests with LoadSIM with no issue.
