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I have some write problems on my system. One of the most ravenous virtual machine is Exchange 2013 with only 70 mailboxes. This is a writes list dump example:

enter image description here

If we exclude all EDB files and exchange mailbox LOGs I get many application/performance logs, for example:

  • C:\Windows\System32\config\SOFTWARE.LOG1
  • C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\Monitoring\Monitoring\MSExchangeHMWorker\ActiveMonitoringTraceLogs

Are these logs useful/enabled by default or can I optimize my Exchange to reduce the disk writes?

Tobia
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1 Answers1

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Anything under Windows\System32\config is sort of like a transaction log for your registry. You definitely want that to keep operating.

You can disable the health monitoring/managed availability by setting MSExchangeHM service to 'manual' and stop the service. That accounts at least one of those entries, but likely 3 of them. I'm sure it's a continuous source of heartache in your case. You want it running on a healthy server, but it won't harm anything if it's not running; it'll make it harder to troubleshoot issues without it. Read more about it here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn482056%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx

Anything under Windows\SoftwareDistribution is related to windows update. Probably downloading updates at the time you snapped this screenshot.

Obviously, you can't stop any of the NTFS logs or the MFT writes.

If this is causing issues right now, It sounds like you've over-committed your storage solution for your virtual machines. Or you started with too underpowered of a solution to begin with; I've been there haha. What I see in the screen shot is very light disk usage. If your storage solution shouldn't be this slow, then put your time into fixing that. If you're running something like iSCSI over a 1Gbps link for 20+ virtual machines, you're going to want to upgrade that.

Neil
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