Exchange 07' "Best practices"

[UnibankBS]

Just like the title says.....

Looking for best practices on exchange 07'

Currently, I'm in the "planning" stages of creating a new box.

Some questions which follow best practices:
-Recommend 03' or 08? (Or does it not matter?)
-Will keep the store on a SAN (off of the physical box)
-VM or physical box?
-Currently I'm "planning" to do a VM. The vm will house 200 endusers once the conversion is finalized. What do you recommend, dedicated box or vm? I DO plan to take advantage of VMOTION / DBL take for offside disaster recovery.... so please take this into consideration on what you recommend.
Note: VM server will be hosting other guest OSs which house SMS 07' sharepoint and our main DC.... again please take these into consideration.
-backups, will be using BackupExec

I look forward to your feed back everyone.

 

[58sniper]

2008
SAN - properly configured using the storage calculator, and ONLY using RAW disk access
physical is my preference

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/

 

[Zelandakh]

Doubletake or SCR. Depends on your budgets.

 

[58sniper]

SCR would get my vote. It's an easier solution to support, IMHO.

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/

 

[xmsre]

If you're going to use vmotion, don't cluster Exchange.
You sound like you want to use Vmotion for HA within a site and then something else to another site for DR. I guess that leaves SCR unless you leverage something from your SAN vendor for replication.

If you do 2008 on an FC SAN and then pass it through as an RDM, you want a logical RDM so that you can use Vmotion. If you use a physical RDM you can't. You'll also want to be at the latest VMware patch levels. There was a fix for FC RDM Luns.