Microsoft provides a lot of written guidance on their Technet site for preparing to migration to Exchange Server 2010.  However a lot of the guidance requires environment-specific inputs to make those planning decisions.

Here are five tools that can help you collect the information you need to plan your migration to Exchange Server 2010.

Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer

The ExPDA tool performs a scan of your existing Exchange and Active Directory environments and produces a report that lists all items that require attention prior to deployment.

The items are broken down into critical, warning and informational items.  Critical items are those that will prevent deployment of Exchange Server 2010, while warnings can sometimes be ignored (eg an item that will slightly degrade the Exchange 2010 experience, or a feature that is no longer available in Exchange 2010).  The informational items contain some general information that is useful for planning too.

One of the strengths of this tool is that for each of the critical or warning items it identifies it provides you a link to guidance on how to resolve the issue.

Download the Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer from Microsoft here.

Exchange Server Profile Analyzer

The EPA tool performs a scan of either a single database or the entire organization to create an aggregated report of mailbox statistical information.

Some of the useful information that is produced includes totals and averages for the size and number of mailboxes in the organization, number of email items in mailboxes and sub-folders of mailboxes, and the average sizes of email attachments.

All of this information is useful for capacity planning, as well as when planning for the mailbox migration schedule which is heavily impacted by mailbox item counts and sizes.

Download the Exchange Server Profile Analyzer from Microsoft here.

Performance Monitor

The built-in Performance Monitor tool for Windows lets you collect performance data for every element of the Exchange servers and use it for capacity planning of the new Exchange 2010 servers.

You can use performance data to calculate such data as the current IOPS per mailbox, email traffic volumes, and any unusual performance burdens being created by the usage patterns within the organization.

To make collection of performance data easier there are the Perfwiz XML templates available from Microsoft.

Mailbox Server Requirements Calculator

The most complicated server role in an Exchange Server 2010 environment to calculate the sizing for is the Mailbox Server role, particularly when it comes to storage.

Fortunately Microsoft provides the Mailbox Server Requirements Calculator, which is a complex Excel spread sheet that takes a series of data inputs and recommends a storage configuration to deploy.

I sometimes find the recommendations a little excessive but that is usually due to hasty data collection using other tools leading to overestimation of such things as email usage profiles for users.

When the appropriate amount of time is dedicates to the collection of all of the input requirements for this calculator the output is usually very reliable.

Download the Mailbox Server Requirements Calculator from Microsoft here.

Log Parser

The final tool on this list is Log Parser, a powerful tool for querying text-based log files such as those that are generated by IIS and Message Tracking on Exchange servers.

Although it has a bit of a learning curve there are plenty of query samples available online to make basic usage easy to grasp.

Two handy users of Log Parser when planning an Exchange 2010 migration are querying the Message Tracking logs to determine the volumes of email being sent and received daily by each server, and querying the SMTP virtual server logs for a list of distinct IP addresses that are using the server to for SMTP relay.

Download the Log Parser 2.2 tool from Microsoft here.