Background Database Maintenance in Exchange 2010

Database size is a critical aspect to consider in Exchange 2010 designs where DAG is in play. This is regardless of the disk backend you choose. JBOD, DAS RAID, and SAN designs all need planning where small passive databases are in play. Since Microsoft offers no configurability of BDM on passive databases, there is nothing you can do but be aware of and plan for the workload (aside from going with a standalone configuration).

Many Exchange administrators are used to having small databases (100-200GB) so that ESE maintenance tasks and restore SLAs are easier to address.  I find that this can trip up otherwise solid storage architectures.  BDM can lead to problems, primarily because admins aren’t necessarily aware that BDM schedules that they set via EMC or powershell applies only to the active copy of the database.

Microsoft calls background database maintenance “online database scanning” or “database checksumming” or “background database maintenance”.  It can be associated with page zeroing.  It’s a googlicious challenge – and a tagging nightmare for bloggers. 

Let’s see what Technet says about BDM (aka “checksumming”):

Background database maintenance I/O is sequential database file I/O associated with checksumming both active and passive database copies. Background database maintenance has the following characteristics:

• On active databases, it can be configured to run either 24 × 7 or during the online maintenance window. Background database maintenance (Checksum) runs against passive database copies 24 × 7. For more information, see "Online Database Scanning" in the New Exchange Core Store Functionality topic.
• Reads approximately 5 MB per second for each actively scanning database (both active and passive copies). The I/O is 100 percent sequential, so the storage subsystem can process the I/Os efficiently.
• Stops scanning the database if the checksum pass completes in less than 24 hours.
• Issues a warning event if the scan doesn't complete within three days (not configurable).

Let’s reiterate interesting bit:

Background database maintenance (Checksum) runs against passive database copies 24 × 7.

Now let’s look at what another technet page says about this:

Exchange scans the database no more than once per day. This read I/O is 100 percent sequential (which makes it easy on the disk) and equates to a scanning rate of about 5 megabytes (MB)/sec on most systems.

The important thing to remember is that when you set a maintenance schedule for a database as described on this technet page, the setting applies only to the active copy of the database.

Now, how do you plan for this workload?  Frequently, you don’t have to worry about it at all.  Let’s say you have 5000 users with 2GB mailboxes on a server.  That’s 10 TB of mailbox data.  If you have 2 TB mailbox databases, you have about 5 databases, or about 25 MB/s in BDM workload.  Not a problem.

However, if you limit your databases to 100GB, that can present a problem.  That 5000 users translates to 100 databases, each of which can launch a 5MB/s read workload (or more) at any given time.  Aggregated over a whole single mailbox server, 500MB/s is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it’s mixed with user workload on the same disk. 

What you can do to limit the impact of BDM:

1. Use larger databases (1-2TB in size).  Although it will increase the amount of time required to maintain the databases, remember that with a DAG configuration, it’s often more expedient to reseed than it is to do ESE maintenance. 
2. If you are concerned about restore times, use an array that can act as a VSS provider and store your first-tier backups in snapshots, clones, or CDP bookmarks.  In these scenarios, restore times are largely uniform whether you have a 1TB database or a 100GB database (log replay notwithstanding).
3. If after considering hardware-assisted VSS, you STILL can’t leverage larger databases, confer with your storage vendor to architect for what will turn out to be large block reads at unpredictable rates and unpredictable intervals.  To the best of your ability, isolate the passive from active databases so that BDM doesn’t impact user mailboxes.
4. Ask Microsoft why passive database maintenance is not configurable.  As it is today, a completely passive Exchange server can generate over 500MB/s in read bandwidth.  Let’s be crystal clear about this: 500+ MB/s is data warehouse territory, and it’s absurd to think that this can occur with no active users on it, and no backups running against it.  It makes little sense, especially in configurations where the silent corruption they’re looking for is detected by other techniques.

Now, I have a couple questions I haven’t been able to get an answer to:

1. What happens to the schedule when checksum pass completes in less than 24 hours?  Does it start again in 24 hours?  Is that from the start of the prior run, or from the end of the prior run?  An authoritative answer would be helpful for those who have to plan for this workload.
2. What factors can make the scanning run faster or slower than “most” systems?  Does the system issue a 256KB every XX ms?  Does that depend on the processor clock rate?  Can we thus expect the read rate to increase with clock rate?  The difference between 5-8 MB/s doesn’t really matter on a single database, but it really does matter when you’re talking about hundreds or thousands of databases on a single disk array.

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Impressive blog! -Arron