Vault I/O load simulator?

[worldzfree]

I am building out some test virtual configurations and was wondering if there were any tools that could simulate Vault load on these boxes?  I could easily enough just overbuild the configuration but would prefer a more balanced choice.   I have already referenced the performance guides but they just give loose recommendations.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

there's really no tools out there to test EV with as far as stress testing goes
What you could do is run everything through LoadSim , start heavy journal loads, you could also write some API scripts to continuously retrieve items.

Also with loadsim you can get it to create thousands upon thousands of users, Distribution lists etc, so you can use that to judge the performance of provisioning etc

Next you can archive the users with hundreds of items in them each then have something like Mailbox Manager to move items to different folders and then run update shortcut locations

But the problem is, you're going to be starting from scratch in a test environment, meaning it will be pristine, however your production environment will have all sorts of gpo's, nested DL's, it will have quirks that you just won't be able to replicate easily

Plus unless you invest properly to match your storage properly, you may see that your test environment performs slower than what a real environment would be, especially if you start using VM's to run it all.

Plus its impossible to simulate the behavior of users, you could start distributing Virtaul Vault and you might find that people start moving tiems, archiving items, deleting items etc.

There is only so much benchmarking you can do in a test environment and i guess without having it in a production environment, how would you judge what is acceptable and what isn't acceptable?

[GertjanA]

Check this:

http://www.viveksharma.com/TECHLOG/archive/2006/12/21/announcing-the-exchange-2007-powershell-script...

It will populate your exchange environment, sent mails etc. Really cool.

[worldzfree]

i should clarify.  my goal is not to test vault load on exchange.  my goal is to beat the crap out of a box that will eventually be a vault server.  any tools for that?

[JesusWept3]

well considering 50% of your load is exchange based anyway, either loadsim or the tools that gertjan pointed to are good starts, because you can't produce a significant amount of work for a server to do until it has a significant amount of items to archive and be retrieved.

So again, loadsim can create thousands upon thousands of users and mailbox, get in journaling a ton of items, have journal task journaling items constantly, rebuild some index, maybe go a few steps further and create an app to continually call download.asp

Maybe shove some PST files in etc etc