Bonnie,
What spec is the old exchange box? What is your average OWA usage, I take
your 1600-1700 users mainly use Outlook. If it is only to handle a small
number of concurrent users then the PII with more ram (256MB ish) would be
more than fine. The only reason for the RAID would be for protection as
performance should be mostly related to RAM/Processor and your internet
pipe. As for a gigbit NIC, I cannot see how this would increase the
performance unless your DMZ port on the firewall is also gigabit. Also you
dont really need a lot of disk space for OWA so larger drives would not
probably be a huge benefit either.
Hope this is helpful, just my 2c worth ;)
Richard
-----Original Message-----
From: Miller Bonnie L. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 12 September 2001 15:23
To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues
Subject: OWA Server
I'm starting to investigate hardware for our eventual (maybe by winter
break?) migration to Exchange 2000 from 5.5. Our current Exchange server is
running SSL OWA on the same server as Exchange. When we move to 2000, we
are looking at having a Server for Exchange, and a separate Win2k IIS5
server in the DMZ that runs OWA.
We already have an idea of what we'll be purchasing for the Exchange server,
but I'm looking for recommendations to spec out the server that will run
OWA. We have almost 1800 exchange accounts, probably 1600-1700 of which are
in use and might be accessed via OWA. Single server, single site (although
we'd have 2 up during the migration, we will end up with one again). This
IIS server would only run OWA and not other major services such as www/ftp
sites, dns, etc.
We have a few older "generic" server boxes that are currently being taken
out of service and reassigned as we consolidate domains, and I'm wondering
if one of these would serve this purpose. One is a PII 266 w/96 ram,
Adaptec Ultra2 4GB and 9GB hds, 100MB Intel server NIC. We would probably
consider buying a hardware raid controller, more memory, some larger hard
drives, and possibly a gigabit NIC, if you think the processor could handle
the requests and it would cost sufficiently less. If this wouldn't work,
our current contracted vendor is Dell, so we would be looking at something
from them.
Thanks for your input, comments, corrections, flames ;)-I'll gladly provide
more info as needed. I really don't have any idea at this point as I'm
diving headfirst into Exchange while still in the midst of our Win2k
migration (mostly completed at the server level). I've done some
preliminary white-paper reading, but have not yet been to any E2k training.
(Believe me, I plan on it before we migrate though!)
-Bonnie M.
List Charter and FAQ at:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/exchange_list_charter.htm
List Charter and FAQ at:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/exchange_list_charter.htm
