Budgeting for Exchange 2010... that time of year again.

[cajuntank]

It's that time of year again for us, we are starting to budget for our wants and needs for next school year. I want to budget for an upgrade to 2010 and I usually use the sizer utilities from HP (I only run HP servers), but they are dragging their feet on their Exchange 2010 sizer (the link finally made it up on their website, but it still doesn't work).

Here's what I have... 1 DL380 G5 server, 16GB RAM, maxed out with 146GB SAS HD(s) running Exchange 2007 SP2 (multi-role except for UM... I have a little over 600 users). I have another DL380 G5 that is exactly configured except a little better processor speed (both server dual processor, dual core). My thoughts were to install Exchange 2010 on this second DL380 (again, multi-role), move all of my mailboxes over to it, confirm operation, decommission the other DL380/Exchange 2007, fresh install OS and Exchange 2010, put in hardware load balancer, and have both servers in a DAG.

So first question is, is this a legitimate scenario or am I missing something?
Second question is, and assuming question 1 is legit, I want to add storage in either the form of another SAN node off of my LeftHand SAN, or a dual domain storage enclosure. Suggestions?
Third and finally, I will want to add the UM role to the party at some point in time. In this scenario, again assuming part 1 was legit, would adding the role to the existing servers make sense, or completely dedicating this off to totally other hardware make more sense?

Sorry for the length.
Thanks.

 

[58sniper]

You don't give us enough info to make an educated decision. what's the mailbox limit for the users? What's the deleted item retention period? Deleted mailbox period? IOPS per user?

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[cajuntank]

Right now I have a 200MB limit for 500 users(teachers) and 500MB for 100 users(administration). This is also how I have my storage groups broken down as well; one SG for Teachers, and another for Administration. Retention time right now is 7 days, but that is flexible as I have an archival appliance from a company called ArcMail that I or the user can go to, to retrieve any deleted or archived messages. My disk layout currently is RAID1 for OS, RAID1 for Logs, and RAID1+0 for DB... all on 146GB 10K SAS drives (the server maxes out internally to 8 drives). Also, less than 5% of my users have Blackberrys with a BES involved. With this configuration, I have never had any performance issues nor have I seen anything out of wack from the performance counters when I run performance monitor on the box every couple of months. The only other two processes I run against the box are antivirus (AVG) and a backup agent from AppAssure called Replay.

 

[58sniper]

I don't see this happening with 8 drives. Without spending too much time on it, I come up with 1 DB LUN of 172GB (RAID 1+0), and 1 log LUN of 29GB (RAID 1+0), and a restore LUN of 186GB (RAID 5). That requires 11 disks, and doesn't include the OS or paging volumes, nor any volumes for tracking logs.

I didn't have enough to be more detailed, such as average message size, average message count per day/per user, etc. I come up with 8 cores and 12GB of RAM.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[cajuntank]

I had been planning on adding storage in either the form of an MSA60 which has 12 slots and can be untilized in a dual domain scenario (my thought if I used this, was have 6 drives for one server and 6 for the second server in the DAG). That scenario, I would have a total of 14 slots, but that includes my OS, Paging, Logs, and DB. I also have the option of adding another node to my iSCSI SAN, but each node only has 8 slots. My backup solution from AppAssure negates the need for a restore LUN.
Our system averages 2 messages per minute outgoing and 140 messages per minute incoming for all users, and I'd venture my average message size is around 8K-16K (but that's a guess), so I would consider a lightly used system. I would just like the piece of mind the other server would give me should one go down.

 

[zbnet]

With just 600 users, I would have though both the system volume and the transaction logs volume could share the same physical pair of mirrored spindles (you've got enough space with 146GB drives). The thinking is that most everything you need off the C-drive gets loaded into memory at boot-up; and the transaction log writing is optimised for slow disks the most it ever has been in 2010.

 

[58sniper]

Space has nothing to do with it. You need performance, room for missed backups, etc.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/