Best Hardware Setup for Exchange 2003

[fdoty]

I have a customer and we are going to qoute a 2003 Exchange Server. So far all my customers have only 10-100 users with a single Exchange Server in each location.

This company has 300 users and one domain. I suggested maybe two or three servers but they are insistent on having one big main server to handle all the email. Does anyone have any guidance on what kind of hardware requirements they are going to need? Is the server just going to bog down with that many users? Can one server actually handle this many users effectively?

On a second note, has anyone setup a virtual Exchange Server? I am reading articles about it but am not sure of the shortcomings.

Thanks for your input!!

 

[nickpark]

300 users won't be a problem for a single server at all! (unless they each have 10gb mailboxes and 100,000 emails in there inboxes... but what idiot would let that happen to their mailbox?!)

However, additional (or virtual) hardware could be useful for DR/testing purposes.

 

[fdoty]

Thanks for your input. Would you recommend RAID5 SCSI Drives, RAID1 or something else for performance?

 

[anawrocki]

A properly sized exchange server can handle 300 users. You have to factor in mail box metrics. Another thing to consider is the redundancy you would get out of haveing 2 or 3 lesser servers.

 

[rjs]

We have RAID 1 for the OS and the transaction logs; the databases are on RAID 5. We have two, dual core CPUs and load it up with RAM. There are some excellent replication apps out there. We have been using DoubleTake. With its DTAM app, it can handle automatic or manual failover.

R.Sobelman

http://www.tracklogins.com

 

[cajuntank]

As far as hardware specs, we normally use HP or Dell. I like the HP DL380 series. The G4 model has 6 SCSI slots for drive and a split backplane ie... 2 drives RAID1 for O.S. on one SCSI channel, 2 drives RAID1 for Transaction Logs, and 2 drives RAID1 for database & SMTP queue on other channel. The new G5 has 8 slots for SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), so you could put the SMTP queue on it's own RAID1 pair. This is a rack mount server so if you want tower, go with the ML370 series. Just make sure you get a write enabled array controller and set it to 100% write since that's what Exchange does most of it's time doing. Make sure it has fast access to your AD/Global Catalog servers and you'll be set.

Can't offer any opinion on the virtual server scenario, have not done that yet.

 

[fdoty]

Thanks! That's a lot of good feedback. We are a Dell reseller so that helps me out a ton.

 

[Zelandakh]

As a Dell reseller go for the poweredge 2950, fill it with 10k disks and do 3 for the OS / Exchange and 3 for the TLs on a second internal controller. Then stick a powervault on it with 7 disks at least as RAID 5 for the data. 4GB of RAM and 2003 Server.

That should be fairly inexpensive and really run nice.

Get a second box as a second GC/DC for resilience.

 

[fdoty]

They already have a 2003 domain in place. I'm just adding the Exchange Server itself. I would not install Exchange on a DC anyway.

So SCSI drives for sure then and not SATA drives? I see a lot of servers offering SATA but I always that SCSI was a better, faster more telerant drive. I read and see where SATA is a beefed up IDE drive. I guess if you do RAID 5 it really doesn't matter.

I don't want to put together anything TOO extravagante but it needs to get the job done!!

 

[NickFerrar]

Dell tested 2850's up to 900 users before they started seeing performance issues so a 2950 with dual CPUs can cope easily with 300 users.

Disk it all depends on budget, useage patterns and mailbox limits. Traditionally you want separate volumes for the OS, TLs and Store. In our environment we just have 2 RAID containers, one RAID-1 with 15k 73GB SCSI drives that has the OS and TLs and another that's RAID-5 with 4 x 73GB 15k drives that has the Store. It would be nice to have had the TLs on a separate container but the Dell PERC is only 2 channel so it I couldn't see it helping much.

If you have the budget then for sure use 2 RAID containers internally with the split backplane, 1 for OS 1 for TLs and the Store on an external PowerVault. That seems a bit overkill for 300 users though unless they have huge mailboxes and are high volume users.

 

[cajuntank]

So SCSI drives for sure then and not SATA drives? I see a lot of servers offering SATA but I always that SCSI was a better, faster more telerant drive. I read and see where SATA is a beefed up IDE drive. I guess if you do RAID 5 it really doesn't matter."

I personally would do SCSI for 300 user scenario. If you do some research on the web for Exchange performance tuning, you will see a lot mentioned about IOPS (I/o Operations Per Second) and the comparison of SCSI and SATA along with that discussion (too much info to list out here). SATA is still based upon an ATA architecture and is still no match for SCSI when it comes to a higher amount of users hitting those drives. Just my personal preference; If it's a heavily used server and it's accessed a majority of the day if not all day, then SCSI (SAS). If it's a lightly used server and accessed during normal business hours, then I have no problem with ATA (SATA). RAID levels are also another discussion simply because certain RAID levels offer different read/write performances, have overhead concerns, and come with varying costs of implementation depending on you concerns for performance and need for redundancy.

 

[rliebsch]

I have had a recent struggle that I finally over came.

The end results:
3GB of RAM, really, you'll use it.
RAID1+0, its costly, but it is VERY fast.
SCSI wins over SATA because SCSI drives are spinnig at 15K

Additionally, I have a different RAID controller for OS/Binaries/TL and a separate controller for DB

my 2cents.

Robert Liebsch
Stone Yamashita Partners

http://www.stoneyamashita.com/