Exchange 2010 sizer calculator -58Sniper

[blade1000]

Hello,

This is for anyone who can help but would love Pat's input if he can answer..

I am looking to build proper DAG for a client. There are roughly 1200 mailboxes but as time progresses this number will grow without question.

I am wondering how accurate the Exchange 2010 mailbox sizer calc tool is in evaluating how many disks I will need for this amount of users listed.
Are there any other or better free tools that can give me how many disks I will need and how to carve my luns.

Also I am looking at configuring 2 mailbox servers and clustering them, create 1 DAG and adding the 2 active DB's from each server and then creating replica copies for each.

Does make logical sense, should keep the design simple but functional.

thanks for any input

blade

 

[58sniper]

The sizing calculator is all you need. But you have to put some numbers in for expected growth. That can be somewhat difficult, but you only need to determine growth until the next server refresh (in my installs, that's generally not more than 3 years). You also need to factor in IOPS increases caused by solutions such as Blackberry Enterprise Server and archiving solutions that use journaling.

You don't mention how big the mailboxes are, but splitting 1200 into 2 DBs may be inefficient. You may want more databases that are smaller. This decreases recovery time, decreases impact if a DB is offline (which shouldn't happen with the DAG, but it could), 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/

 

[blade1000]

Thanks Sniper very much,

The business uses (as a standard) 250mb mailboxes -and there are roughly under 1200 of them.

You are right 2 dbs are not the way to go from what I'm reading in the white papers/books etc.

So perhaps break it up into further db's based on department? or perhaps status? Executives, mid-managers, and standard employees?

we have 600GB SAS drives @ 10k rpm (there are 3 x 48 drives) so that gives us something close to 8 tera?

This is obviously for a larger user move overall and in the future (6500 mailboxes) but the pilot group for this year is only 1200 mailboxes.

what are your thoughts on this? but I'll run the numbers again..

I guess what I want to know is will this calc tool tell me how many spindles and luns I will need? what tabs tell me this output information, either the tool is ambiguous or I just don't see the values correctly.

thanks
blade

 

[58sniper]

The calculator will tell you everything you need, including spindle count, RAID type, etc.

I'm not a fan of splitting people into DBs by dept, locale, etc. Do it randomly. If you split them by dept, and that DB goes down, you've idled the entire dept. The caveat is that if you want to manage things like mailbox settings by dept size, then it's a little more work.

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/

 

[blade1000]

Sniper,

Gotcha, I ran the numbers between the MS Exchange 2010 sizer and the HP (similar) sizer tool.

The company purchased a Dell Equalogic (raid 50 ugh!!!) but whatever.. so I just need to nail a few things but have a grasp on some numbers, this equalogic uses Raid 50, 600gb SAS 10k drives for storage.. I have collectively 6500 mailboxes - this should be interesting. I am not sure if I should use 3 active DAG's here and keep 2 as replicas (this creates an odd lot if you will but is how MS Exchange 2k10 sizer is telling me to do it...) wouldn't I be better off using equal numerics here ? but use 2 DAG have 4 mailbox servers, 2 Active db's in one DAG and 2 replicas on yet another DAG? just want to keep it somewhat simple.

thanks
blade