Database and mailbox size recommendations

[brichr]

Hello, We are looking at exchange 2007 as a solution for email. Right now we have groupwise 7. We have 400GIG postoffices, and most of our users have 5GIG and up mailboxes. We never have corruption and almost 0 downtime.

If we go to exchange 2007, how small do I have to make my users mailboxes, and how small do my databases have to be to be reliable. Does anyone have a max limit that they would never go over in production?

 

[pagy]

Take a look at;

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/03/14/395229.aspx

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/15/432199.aspx

Generally I will have more smaller DBs than one or two large DBs.

The issue with mailbox size has more to do with Outlook performance than anything else..

I have to ask if you are using Groupwise, and I know from experience how stable it is, and you say you have little or no downtime why look at changing?

Paul
MCTS: Exchange 2007, Configuration
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[58sniper]

Outlook performance is tied more to item count that size.

While the 100GB/200GB recommendations from the product group apply in 2007, 2010 supports much larger databases, and doesn't need a SAN.

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/

 

[brichr]

Thanks for the info. Yeah I foresee having a bunch of smaller databases on exchange rather than a few big ones. We have not purchases anything so I was waiting until 2010 with seems like it can support bigger databases anyway, so that is good to know.

We are leaving Netware for Windows, so I am just looking into exchange, we have not moved yet. But Im not going to fight Novells battle at my work any more. Groupwise 8 might be an option but the big shots will decide its fate.

 

[58sniper]

Better watch your migration path. You'll certainly be using third party tools to migrate. So make sure whatever you use (such as Quest's GroupWise Migrator for Exchange), can support going to 2010 from whatever version of GW you're using.

There is an excellent series on migrating from GW to Exchange 2007 at my old site,

http://www.msexchange.org/

that probably won't be terribly different for 2010.

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/