There is nothing magic about SBS, it is just standard windows and Exchange with some management wizards thrown in (at least 2000 and 2003).
For 75 users performance isn't going to be an issue. The only real concern is getting the Exchange logs and store on separate drive arrays because that allows recovery with no lost data if the Exchange store is lost. Other than that, the only other concern is the possibility that your file share data could fill the disk and make exchange unhappy if both are on the same partition. However, as Jim points out, your proposed setup is not a best practice. I also seem to recall that you have to jump through some special hoops to get BES installed on such a setup. Putting your file server on an old PC is a reasonable idea, but I'd want redundant disks. A PC with two 500GB mirrored drives would give you lots of room to grow and wouldn't cost much. My personal recommendation would be to use windows mirroring on a PC. Why? Because all of the PC type "RAID" cards I've seen actually do the RAID function in software rather than on the hardware. I trust Microsoft's RAID implementation more than I do some most PC hardware vendors. Some other things to be aware of: 1. BES logs will grow without bound. You will need to periodically clean them up. 2. Exchange has special backup requirements. If you don't backup Exchange properly, its transaction logs will grow without bounds. For 75 users, I'd also consider using a nightly scheduled Exmerge to do "brick level" backups of the Exchange mailboxes in addition to normal Exchange backups. This makes it *so* much easier to recover items for users if they unintentionally modify something and want to go back to a previous version. Caveat: since Exmerge dumps mailboxes to old style PST files (which have a 2GB limit), you will want to limit users' mailboxes to 1.5GB. Oh, google "DumpsterAlwaysOn" too. ________________________________ From: Kennedy, Jim [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 9:25 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Domain Controller HD setup It is always easy to spend someone else's money......so here goes. I would not put AD and Exchange on the same server unless it was an SBS server. That is generally viewed as bad. It makes disaster recovery far more complicated and I believe that configuration is not supported or recommended by MS. That said you don't have enough drives/raid for what you want to do (properly). OS on a mirror set. Exchange on its own raid set, then the store on its own and the logs on their own. File storage on its own raid set. One thing to consider is taking a decent desktop and beef it up and make it your file server. I did that in an office of 65 people in the past and it worked out great. Or get a few more dollars and buy a decent server (nothing fancy) and put AD and the file server on that one machine. From: Aaron T. Rohyans [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 9:08 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Domain Controller HD setup Ok folks - question time... Being the "just good enough to be dangerous" type at anything other than Cisco, I thought I would pose this question to the group for some insight. I am in the process of building our new DC. We are a small shop of about 75 employees, so we host AD, Exchange, File Sharing, and BlackBerry Server off of this one server. My question is... how would you guys setup your hard drives in this bad boy for optimal results (primarily for Exchange)? Right now, from the factory it came with 2 x 73Gb SATA and 3 x 146Gb SATA in no RAID. I was thinking of mirroring the 73Gb HDs together for the OS install, but after that I'm not sure what would be best. We have roughly 80Gb of crap that we'll need to store for File Sharing. Any thoughts? Thanks all! Aaron ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
