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If you have ever wanted to have a look at the Performance of your Exchange Server, any version, then this is the post for you

Using PerfWiz you can easily configure a Performance Monitor counter to take a snapshot of your server over a given period of time, the best part is it uses a wizard to capture the counters that mean the most to a Windows Server/Exchange Server so you do not have to be a PerfMon genius. Then using the PAL tool you can analyze the .blg file that the PefWiz counter creates and get a nice report with graphs to review and diagnose or build baselines of your Exchange Server. The report even explains what the counters mean and what you should be looking for. You install the PerfWiz on your Exchange Server (quick and easy install, no reboot required) and PAL on any workstation, there are some pre-reqs for the PAL tool so make sure to read through them on the site below.

Keeping an eye on performance trends can be invaluable when trying to justify hardware upgrades or for better tuning of your servers. I am sure you will find this tool combination useful.

PerfWiz - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=31FCCD98-C3A1-4644-9622-FAA046D69214&displaylang=en

PerfWiz - (Exchange 2007) - http://blogs.technet.com/mikelag/archive/2008/05/02/perfwiz-replacement-for-exchange-2007.aspx

PAL - http://pal.codeplex.com/

Recently I ran across a scenario where a company had migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 and noticed that their Search functionality was behaving differently. They, like most, used their email as a major component of their business. Work orders would come into their mailboxes and they would use Search to find and manage the flood of inbound emails. Each email would have a subject pattern that was somewhat predictable based on their work ordering numbering scheme. When they would search they would search for their portion of the code. This portion was not always the first portion of the string of characters. When using Exchange 2003 this worked great. Once they moved to Exchange 2007, they got inconsistent results. Why? Answer

Search in Exchange 2007 (Exchange Search) is completely different from earlier versions of Exchange. Improvements were made to performance, Content Indexing, and Search. New items are indexed almost immediately after their arrival into a mailbox giving end users a fast, reliable, and more stable search function. In Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003, indexing was not enabled by default.