Monitoring Exchange 2010 database maintenance

By default Exchange 2010 will performance maintenance activities throughout the day. If you're monitoring your storage performance, and if it's virtualized you should be, you can see a higher level of disk utilization than normal, especially during off hours. To make sure it's just database maintenance and not an issue:

- Start Performance Monitor by going to Start>Run>Perfmon

- Under "Monitoring Tools" select "Performance Monitor"

- Click the green plus sign to add a monitor.

- Select the local computer, scroll down to "MSExchange Database Instancess", select "Database Maintenance Duration", "I/O Database Reads / Sec", and "I/O Database Writes / Sec", and select all database instances in the pane below it. 

- Right click in the graph, select properties, select the "graph" tab, and change the view to report.


Now you can see how long the maintenance has been running, and the load it's placing on your storage system. Maintenance appears to generate about 30-35 IOPS and about 7-8 Mbps per database being processed.