A few comments: * Global Catalog - Load generated by Exchange 2000. Does the Workstation have enought RAM and CPU power to handle the load? It looks like this may become your weakest link in the whole system. * If you absolutely have to use a workstation as a DC/GC...try to get three of them working as DC/GC. That would translate to an average of 400 users per DC/GC... * Software RAID vs. Hardware RAID - If you absolutely have to use IDE, why don't you consider getting an IDE RAID controller card...very very very cheap and much more reliable then a software RAID solution.... www.promise.com
That's my two-bits. Leonard -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Roger Mackenzie Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 9:18 AM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: ADS DC hardware Folks, I'm looking for practical experience from anyone running 'minimal' hardware configurations for domain controllers in an AD forest supporting Exchange 2000/5.5. We are currently very cash strapped but really do need to move on Exchange 2000 from our current Exchange 5.5 environment. We're spinning about 70Gb of Exchange data across two servers (50Gb/20Gb). There are about 1000 NT4 domain users in one domain and around 250 in a trusting domain. We have a serious server configuration we can deploy for Exchange itself to allow mailbox relocation to Exchange 2000 with recycling of the current servers as they are freed up. We have been offered several modern desktop systems which I'm contemplating deploying as domain controllers. The big argument against doing this would be disk failure intolerance - though we would software mirror across 2 IDE drives per machine. Has anyone any experience of this scenario as far as DCs are concerned? Would you offer any cautions from experience? I should say our current NT4 PDC is a fairly limited desktop box and the experience on what is a small domain has been completely OK. Regards, Roger Mackenzie (Glasgow University) _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
