Exchange profile analyzer

It depends on a lot of factors, how many users, growth, current size of the databases etc etc

I have an environment here, 2000 users, I ran it for 2 weeks to get a half decent baseline. I would have preferred 4 weeks to be honest.

Depending on the size of your infrastructure, the time taken by the profile analyzer differs. As per Microsoft, Profile Analyzer has the capability to process 500 KB per sec.

you ran the analyzer out of office hours?

This environment has around the same number and has a DAG.

The databases are huge, one of the databases is 1.4 tb

It's on a fiber backbone so I did it during the day without any performance issues. You could run it out of hours but again it depends on a number of factors.

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Recommendations for running the EPA

Make sure that the Exchange Server Profile Analyzer is run during a maintenance period to avoid a potential effect on server performance that could increase client access latency, and thereby adversely affect your Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The tool moves slowly through the data in the user mailboxes, at a rate of approximately 500 KB to 1 MB of data per second. Therefore, you should select a small, representative group of mailbox databases in your organization, and collect data from those databases only.

By default, the tool collects data from only a single mailbox on each server at the same time. To collect data from multiple mailbox databases at the same time, either run multiple instances of the tool by creating multiple configuration files, or change the configuration file by following the information in the "Entering Information in the Configuration File" section.

The effect of collecting data from each mailbox will resemble synchronizing a mailbox for a new Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 cached mode user.

During the data collection process, we recommend that you monitor the mailbox servers and look for any significant increase in RPC Averaged Latency. This would indicate a performance problem on the server. If there are multiple instances of the tool running, this can increase the load on the server. If the server is experiencing performance issues because of this, reduce the number of instances of the tool running to keep the server in a healthy state.
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Pulled from

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/dee220bb-46ea-4477-9e0a-e6fedb893360/running-exchange-server-profile-analyzer-on-production-e2k7-sp1-environment

There are 4 databases in this environment, two are over 1TB in size.

I would need to run the EPA against all databases.  This company send and receive large image attachments.

two databases are active on each server so i could run the EPA on two different servers at the same time, rather than running multiple instances on one server

Yes you could, if I remember correctly the analyzer is capable of running on your exchange organisation rather than just individual servers

discovered that i cannot use EPA on exchange 2010.