Paul, I know nothing about clustering and SAN, except what I've heard, and
very little about virtual servers. All I can say is that all of those
things make me nervous. Drop my lone Exchange server in a maelstrom of
abstraction, complexity, and failure points? My instincts are all in the
opposite direction -- make Exchange a self-contained fortress with only the
necessary net connections. Interestingly, MS seems to be tending that way.
I've heard that they recommend direct attached storage now over SAN.
Have you considered just adding another Exchange server to share the load?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Hutchings" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Exchange Discussions" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 3:04 AM
Subject: Nearly Full Exchange Server/Virtualization Help
At the current rate of usage, I reckon I have around 3 months until our
single Exchange 2003 SP2 Enterprise server is full.
Adding more disk capacity isn't an option as there are no more drive
bays, plus the box is due to be replaced in around six months so it's
not viable to be throwing money at it now.
We do have a 2 server ESX cluster sat on a Clariion AX4 FC SAN.
Our userbase is diverse, people like to horde and never delete/archive,
and I haven't helped us by not having any hard mailbox or message size
limits.
My rough plan for when the box was due for renewal was to virtualize
anyway, and also to add a third box to the cluster.
As I see it, one plan to deal with the imminent problem would be to buy
some 15k spindles for the SAN and possibly a little more RAM for the ESX
hosts and move Exchange onto it, job done, end of story.
I'd also like to implement maximum message size limits both internally
and externally, whatever you choose someone won't be happy, and my
initial thoughts are that 25mb seems a figure where anything larger and
you should probably be looking at an alternative means of sending.
We have around 400 users and 190gb of mail (140/50 private/public store
split) in a single Storage Group.
Appreciate any feedback/thoughts/opinions etc.
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