Dan, Yes $300 seems a large amount until the loss of a drive results in a lost order for $50k. For most organizations these days mail is mission critical. I guess from what you say they are NOT proposing a hot spare. In that case I strongly susgest that you run the thing in tetst in degraded mode (i.e. with only two drives) and see how it performs before you pop it into production. You may get a nasty shock. As I said below I did, and we had less than 20 users on the system. As for SATA drives, I have had no personal experience, but the few reports I have read implied that the RAID features were often poorly implemented and again I would not trust these with Exchange. Dave.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Dan DeStefano
Sent: Mon 08/05/2006 14:54
To: [email protected]
Cc:
Subject: RE: OT [ActiveDir] Optimize Exchange Pagefile
I understand what you are saying and, in a perfect world, I would
always recommend mirrored/duplexed arrays to hold at least the exchange log
files. However, most of my clients are small businesses with which money is
more of an object than performance. And at $300+ per SCSI disk, it is difficult
to justify having 2 or more disks that aren’t used to store data.
All that being said, I will discuss this with the people in my
organization as I do not like using RAID5 especially where Exchange is
concerned.
Does anyone have any experience with using SATA II drives in
applications as I have described? With their new NCQ and 3Gb/s features,
combined with their cost/GB, they make an attractive alternative to SCSI for
small businesses.
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dave Wade
Sent: Monday, May 08, 2006 4:59 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: OT [ActiveDir] Optimize Exchange Pagefile
Al,
I still think that interesting (i.e. BAD) things might happen if the
RAID-5 ever flips into degraded mode(i.e. runs on two drives.) The first proper
Exchange Server I built (yes it was 5.0 RTM) was designed for a similar
situation. We were a small business without about 20 people and the server was
a Dual Pentium Pro (I guess with NT4) with a third party raid card (I can't
remember the make). Any way I built it the same way as Dan proposes, and it ran
fine for a while. However we had some issues with temperature control in the
server room and we lost a drive from the array. These days I would have taken
the server off line and allowed the re-build to complete. I didn't and the RAID
card could just not cope with re-building the array and the minimal load we
placed on it. To cut a long story short I spent a long time sorting out the
mess it made of the databases .....
Since then I have been very wary of such configs. In " theory" they
should work. In my experience, and yes it was a long time ago, and hardware
should have improved, it may not.
Dave.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Al
Mulnick
Sent: 05 May 2006 19:06
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Optimize Exchange Pagefile
yeah, there would be some general disagreement from me. Why? Only
because this is SBS box vs. an enterprise Exchange server hosting 5K users.
My laptop (crud that it is) could host 20 heavy exchange users with
usable/good performance with that amount of memory. I don't think the focus of
a machine that will only ever have <75 users should be optimized for more than
space in most situations. It would be a waste of money that could be spent on
other things like better backups, better coffee, etc.
I don't believe there's any value in buying a system such as SBS and
then having to make adjustments to things like pagefile size. That's counter
to the product's reason for being.
Saying that, Dave is correct that optimizing the disk layout has the
biggest benefit, but it's SBS and as such it's "special". Just ask SBS-Lady ;)
Al
On 5/4/06, Dave Wade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If you have 4gig of RAM then you should get minimal paging. (I know
> this is a great generalization)
>
> 1) Log file access is sequential, database is random
> 2) Keeping Log files write queue down is key to performance
> 3) log files are write only
> 4) raid-5 tends to have poor write performance (again greate
generalization).
>
> So I would try and get another drive in the box so I could have a
mirrored pair for OS & LOGS, and a mirrored pair for Databases. . Putting these
on seperate drives will do far more for performance than changing the page
file. RAID-5 is a real bad performer on write. These days I woudl avoid as far
as possible...
>
> I am sure other folks may disagree...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Dan DeStefano
> Sent: Thu 04/05/2006 21:36
> To: [email protected]
> Cc:
> Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Optimize Exchange Pagefile
>
>
>
> Yes, far less than 100, on this box it is under 20.
>
> You do not think it is necessary to mess with the page file,
even if only to make it static?
>
>
>
>
>
> Dan
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _____
>
>
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Dave Wade
> Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 4:06 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Optimize Exchange Pagefile
>
>
>
> There is no point in messing about with memory config if you
only have a three drive RAID 5 array. Disk config is critical. How many users
do you want to put on this box. less than 100?
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Dan DeStefano
> Sent: Thu 04/05/2006 20:16
> To: [email protected]
> Cc:
> Subject: [ActiveDir] Optimize Exchange Pagefile
>
> I was wondering if anyone can point me to any MS
document that discusses optimizing the page file on an Exchange box. I found
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815372, but this article does not discuss the
page file. I am running SBS 2003 on a 3 GHZ Xeon with 4GB physical memory and a
3-disk RAID5 array with 2 logical drives. I plan on installing the Exchange
binaries on the first logical drive (which will also contain the system and
boot partitions) and the Exchange databases, logs, queues, etc on the second
logical drive.
>
>
>
> The way I normally set the pagefile on my systems is
to set it to be static and 1.5x physical RAM. I also create a pagefile on each
disk and let Windows choose the best one (which will be the second logical
drive). I do not want to disable the pagefile on C: because, from what I
understand, this will disable crash dumps, which I do not want. However, I set
the crash dump to kernel only, not the entire pagefile. That being said, would
it be appropriate to set the pagefile on C: to something small like 256MB since
the OS will be using the one on the second drive anyway?
>
>
>
> Also, other than not using the /3GB switch, are there
any other differences between the memory/pagefile settings on a regular
Exchange box running WS2k3 and the SBS2k3 version?
>
>
>
> I would appreciate any guidance.
>
>
>
>
>
> Dan DeStefano
>
> Info-lution Corporation
>
> www.info-lution.com
>
> MCSE - 2073750
>
>
>
>
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