Exchange 2007 Performance Issue

[mickeyh080]

We currently have a 6 year old server installed with server 2003 as the OS and running Exchange 2007. Unfortunately within the last couple of months we have noticed a performance issue which is not only noticeable on the server but the end users Outlook is slow to access emails or shows as temporarily not responding when selecting emails. Having run the exchange tool kit performance monitor the tests reveal high read/write times when accessing the drives. I suspect this could be a drive performance issue and was contemplating doing a hot swap for the drives, one at a time after the RAID has rebuilt using the new drives. Would my logic sound reasonable for this issue and has anyone ever tried hot swapping drives on a an exchange server. Wasn't sure if I needed to possibly dismount any of the storage databases or stop some of the exchange services before attempting this task. We obviously have backups of the Exchange mailboxes together with the system state of the server but with it being such a critical piece of kit any recommendations or suggestions would be welcome.

[Edu-IT]

Server 2003 is end of life now and given it's an internet visible server, I'd be dubious. Have you thought about moving to Office 365 / Google Apps?

[3s-gtech]

Server 2003 goes EOL next April, it wasn't the same as XP and Office 2003.

 

I would certainly look at moving onwards though, with a newer server OS and version of Exchange or O365. You only have six months of security updates left, and it can take a good while to plan and migrate.

[mickeyh080]

Server 2003 is end of life now and given it's an internet visible server, I'd be dubious. Have you thought about moving to Office 365 / Google Apps?

 

I agree we do need to look for the future in terms of upgrading or changing to another solution but with budget restraints and the planning of any migration done properly will take some time. What I'm after is a short term solution to give us time to migrate correctly hence keeping the Exchange server running until then.