Question from a new Exchange Admin 6

[heprox]

My company is currently looking at bringing "in house" our corporate e-mail services. We have outgrown the ability to have some manage the service for us. We are presently looking at Windows 2003 Exchange server for our needs. With 500 e-mail accounts, and growing, what are your opinions of the product? Any recommendations for hardware? We are historically an IBM shop so I was thinking about something like a x346 server with SCSI and set up in a RAID 10? How is the software for SPAM filtering? Any recommendations for Anti-virus intergration? Finally, how does the licensing work? Do you have to purchase a seperate license for an OS to run it on or does it include the license? Standard or Enterprise edition? Any advice would help.

 

[jonbush]

hi,

just some info for you...i have an exchange 2003 server (enterprise ed.) running on an windows server 2003 (enterprise ed.) hardware fault tolerance is essential, raid 5 minimum really, i have a Pentium4 3.0 Ghz cpu with 2Gb of ram, and it works fine for our network 700+ users...

I use TrendMicro antivirus on the mailserver and on the fileservers, and that works great...

for spam etc i use GFI mailessentials, and the exchange servers message filter, which all seems to work well...

I use the enterprise editions for the sake of future planning, in case of a need for clustering etc, and yes you need os and exchange.....

hope this helps...

J.

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I know i've got it backed up somewhere!
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[heprox]

Thanks for the info, that does help a lot. I have on other question though: on the OS that you have Exchange on, do you have to have a CAL for every person that has a mailbox?

 

[sab4you]

I think licensing is per server or per CPU...I would double check tho before ordering

Antivirus, we run Symantec Antivirus for Exchange 4.6 and it works dandy. But you also will need file protection on the servers, so also get a normal antivirus such as Symantec Antivirus Client.

As for standard or enterprise, I dont recall the details - but standard is limited to size, and I am pretty sure 500 boxes is over that size - so you will need Enterprise ed.

For SPAM, there are many choices. We dont use the built in spam so I dont know about that, but I have used mcafee exchange spam and I liked it. Dont know if its the best/worst but it worked fine for me.

 

[AndyPeck]

heprox

Standard edition will do you fine for 500 users, it's the number of mail stores not mailboxes that is limited.

You will need to purchase a license for Ex2003 Standard and Windows 2003 Server standard, then either a CAL per device or per user accessing the system.

My understanding on the CAL's is, if you have 500 licensed copies of MS Office XXXX, which includes outlook xxxx then your covered*

* I'm prepared to be wrong on this

Andy

 

[ntinlin]

For 500 accounts I would recommend Enterprise.
You have a 16Gb limit to the single mail store in std. which would only allow 32Mb per user if my arithmetic is correct.

Enterprise is about $3500, Standard $650. You could of course go for two servers and two copies of standard but you'd spend more on the hardware.

You need an OS license for W2003, an XC2003 Enterprise license, and a CAL for each Exchange client that will be connecting. Exchange CAL is about $70 a pop so not cheap.

Not sure on Andy's point about Office but imagine that MS will want a separate CAL.

You used to be able to get a combo CAL which would give you the OS, XC and SMS CALs altogether at a discount but don't see it in select any more.

Neill

 

[heprox]

I already have a 150 CAL license for Windows 2003 Server Standard, I'm now going to need a 500 CAL license for Exchange? I really only have about 150-200 users on my LAN the rest are at remote sites and connect via the Internet (WAN). Will I need specific licenses to use OWA?

 

[de1458]

apart from all your licensing here is a link, in part 2, about making sense of disk configuration. they have some really good things there, sure somebody already mention this site somewhere in this forum.

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-2003-Tweaks-Part1.html

There are some folks mentioned, if you have a standard ed. now and you can get a ent. license to upgrade it later on by just rerun the installation, I haven't tried myself, so do a search on this forum, see how smooth the transaction it will be in the production env.
OWA, is a yes or no answer, depends on how you depoly your exchange, if the OWA in the DMZ, you have to get exchange ent. as the back end, then the OWA in DMZ can be std. or ent., however, you can just open a port on your firewall to allow access to LAN OWA, aside from the security risk and you have rather big external user base, assume thom connect from WAN use OWA, exchange ent. back end and OWA in DMZ make sense but just bit over kill.

 

[stunpals]

My understanding of the CAL's licensing is as follows:


1. You will need NT CALs for each User or Device on the network accessing the Server.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/licensing/caloverview.mspx

2. You will also need a Exch CAL's for each User or Device connecting to the Exch Server Local or Remote-(VPN or RPC).

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/howtobuy/medium.mspx

Note OWA is included with the Exch CAL

 

[vincelewin]

Can I just rant about Anti spam and email????


I run exchange 2003 with Sophos AV and Sophos Puremessage AntiSPAM filter.

FAULTLESSLY.

Server downloads spam definitials and virus ides. Scans all emails and deletes SPAM, quarantines suspected spam and disinfects all email attachement.

Also does background scanning of mailboxes..

Exceptional product.........very little maintenace required which is good when there are still nt4 servers around...