Sorry - hit send too quickly. Meant to say, you may not have problems...but I wouldn't expect any environment with no limits to go on forever. At the very least, your restore times will be significantly longer with a storage group that large. I'd work the numbers on designing an environment that is bullet-proof as possible for hardware, performance and recovery. Then use the same calculators for an environment with reasonable limits and see what the savings is like.
--James -----Original Message----- From: "Wells, James Arthur" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Exchange Discussions" <[email protected]> Sent: 5/27/08 8:17 AM Subject: RE: Nearly Full Exchange Server/Virtualization Help First - from the size you're describing, and without limits-I'm assuming you have some slow Outlook performance on the client side? That will certainly be helped by spreading the load to more Exchange servers. Even in Outlook Cached Mode, Exchange 2003 has some limits on the resources it can commit to an environment like that. VMWare may also not be very well suited for this type of Exchange environment - VMWare does best with systems that maintain a nominal load - your Exchange systems on VMWare are going to have significant spikes in disk activity, and possibly CPU/RAM. Unless there are no other VMs on that ESX cluster, your performance is goibg to decline. I would use the Exchange 2003 sizing calculators and size your current environment plus growth for a few years. You also may do the same with Exchange 2007, as it's more suited for an environment with no limits, on the performance front. Take the cost numbers and give them to your management. It may be that with an environment your size, you won't have serious problems if you keep going down -----Original Message----- From: "Paul Hutchings" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Exchange Discussions" <[email protected]> Sent: 5/27/08 4:30 AM Subject: RE: Nearly Full Exchange Server/Virtualization Help Accepted and understood. My rationale is that virtualizing the box (feel free to disagree here!) should make maintenance and DR simpler as we do image level VM backups, plus with things like maintenance/hotfixes there is the ability to stop all the services, take a snapshot, and apply the fixes before continuing - I appreciate 100% that this is a not a substitute for a proper exchange aware backups and I'd still be taking these via exchange aware ntbackup. Where I would appreciate a little input is in how I could be smarter about doing things. If you assume VMware's high availability rules out the chances of hardware failure knocking all your VM's out of action, is there any benefit in having say 2 virtual Exchange servers and splitting the mailboxes over those? Is that benefit greater than sticking with a single server and having more than one Storage Group or Private Store? Similar question marks over limits for example, in principle I hate the concept, in practise how else do you stop people hording assuming you can't change their behaviour through education or by throwing money at an archiving package? I have a very good Exchange 2003 book that I shall be referencing, as well as the VMware white papers, but it's never quite the same as advice from people who've been there. Also just to confirm, for the next couple of years I don't see us moving off Exchange 2003, the CAL costs don't seem to make it viable for the benefit so we'll most likely skip and wait it out until 2010/100 or until 2003 no longer does what we need. Cheers, Paul -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ed Crowley Sent: 27 May 2008 06:22 To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Nearly Full Exchange Server/Virtualization Help A 400-user Exchange server should probably be fine for virtualization, but be aware that virtualization does not do anything for you regarding disk performance, the typical Exchange performance bottleneck. SAN doesn't either by itself; the disks on the SAN still must support the required number of I/Os. However, we're talking about 400 users, not 40,000. Be aware of the support issues. Ed Crowley MCITP MCSE+I MCSE+M MCTS MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Paul Hutchings Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 3:04 AM To: Exchange Discussions 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. -- MIRA Ltd Watling Street, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, CV10 0TU, England. Registered in England and Wales No. 402570 VAT Registration GB 114 5409 96 The contents of this e-mail are confidential and are solely for the use of the intended recipient. If you receive this e-mail in error, please delete it and notify us either by e-mail, telephone or fax. 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