In a previous post I instructed how to load balance new mailboxes across databases. In a large environment, however, this determination can take upwards of 90 seconds. Normally I don’t run the mailbox creation script at my company (our IT Security department does), but I ran it yesterday and it took 55 seconds to determine the database. That’s just too long for me.
So I decided to add what was going to be my fallback option in the first place: using a cached list. This code uses an xml file to keep track of the database to use at a given location and a timestamp of when that entry was last updated. The xml file uses the following format:
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<?xml version="1.0"?> <sites> <site id="Name1"> <database name="Server1\Storage Group 1\Mailbox Store 1" /> <timestamp time="2009-09-22T08:59:29.4878574-07:00" /> </site> <site id="Name2"> <database name="Server2\Storage Group 5\Mailbox Store 1" /> <timestamp time="2009-09-22T08:17:51.5632031-07:00" /> </site> .... </sites> |
Set the $sourcexml variable to the full path to the file. The function that calls this code should set the $Location parameter to whatever value is stored in the id attribute of the site nodes. The xml file is opened, the timestamp for a given site name is returned, and compared to a time interval (in this case, 24 hours, but you can set it to anything you want). If less than 24 hours old, the database name in the site node is used. If more than 24 hours old, it will run the code to determine the database to use (from the other post). After the determination is made, it writes the database name and the current time back into the xml file and saves it.
The on-demand query for one site ran in 53 seconds through mailbox creation for the first run, but created the second mailbox in 11 seconds. That is much more tenable, at least for an impatient person like myself.
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$start = Get-Date $sourcexml = "Path to input xml file.xml" [xml]$db = Get-Content $sourcexml $site = $db.sites.site | where {$_.id -eq $Location} [datetime]$lastUpdate = $site.Timestamp.Time if (($start - $lastUpdate).TotalHours -lt 24) { Write-Host "Timstamp for selected site is less than 24 hours old. Using cached entry." $site.database.name } else { Write-Host "Timestamp for selected site is more than 24 hours old. Calculating database to use." #Run code here to determine database to use # #When done, continue $site.database.name = ($mailboxcount.GetEnumerator() | sort value | select -first 1).key $site.timestamp.time = (Get-Date -Format o).ToString() $db.save($sourcexml) $site.database.name } |