Performance Issue when using Outlook 2007 on Exchange 2003

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KapsZ28

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We have a lot of performance issues with our 2003 Exchange servers. Most of the performance problems seem to stem from too many clients having Outlook 2007 installed on their computer. This is what Microsoft says.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949295

I'm guessing based on what Microsoft says, there isn't too much you can do to improve the performance without upgrading to Exchange 2007 or moving clients back to Outlook 2003?

We are seeing what they explain. Too many RPC connections for Exchange 2003 to handle.

According to our Exchange Engineer, we are not seeing disk, network, CPU, or memory performance issues. Only seeing excessive RPC connections on the Exchange server.

I've also heard them blame it on large mailbox capacity as well and that Microsoft recommends no more than 200mb per mailbox. From what I read, size isn't usually the performance issue, but rather the number of items stored in your Inbox, Sent Items, etc.

Also, I came from an enviornment where we had about 200,000 mailboxes all on Exchange 2003 and some mailbox sizes were over 10GB, but we never had the type of performance issues we have at the company I am at now.

I know our Information Stores are located in our SAN. So, what else could be impacting performance or is it just because we have many clients with Outlook 2007 connected to Exchange 2003?
 
What are the actual specs of the exchange server? How are you connected to the SAN?

Before migrating to 2010 we had our hosted environment in 2003 with no issues. More then 500 of the 1000 clients were 2007 or newer outlook clients and we had no problems with performance.
 
Can you describe the issues you are having? Before guessing what is causing it we would need to know where the issues are occurring and what the symptoms are.
 
How are you connecting to the exchange server? Via outlook exchange or exchange over HTTP?
 
Unfortunately I don't know the specs of the servers since I don't have access and the engineer hasn't told me much. He just keeps blaming Office 2007 and too many RDC connections and saying that Exchange 2003 is too old and not meant to handle the load.

The primary issues are slowness and clients constantly getting the pop up message "Outlook is retreiving data from the Microsoft Exchange Server..." The retreiving data message frequently appears when changing views, or doing a search.

We are using MAPI profiles. If I had to guess, there are about 4,000 mailboxes, 1,000 BlackBerry users, and probably 90% or more are using Outlook 2003.
 
Do you have a front end / back end configuration setup? Or are all the roles on one box? You could setup a secondary front end server and load balance between the two.
 
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