Starting again to get aprtitioning right!

[happyhacker]

Following my post about having installed and ended up with one mammoth partition, I have decided to reinstall. I will have to load my RAID 1 driver software (soft Raid) but I've hopefully got that sorted. My question is:

Given that I have 1TByte of storage and in that I want to have a backup set as a local copy. I also have a 1TByte USB drive for scheduled backups. I intend to use the SBS backup facilities to the full and get one of the staff to take the USB device away regularly (daily?). I am thniknig of:

1. 120GByte C: partition (8GByte RAM installed so 12GByte swap file) probably more than generous.

2. 25 users max. so alowing 4GByte per user is 100GByte and thats for Exchange emails. But what about the Exchange Queue files which stay on C: (hence a bit more in 1.).

3. What about file storage part of Data. Does this replicate each Client and should I have another partition for that? Let's say 16 Clients at 20GByte each (office rule?). Given 2. and 3. on one partition I have 420GByte for D (or D (exchange) and E (files)?).

This leaves 450GByte for local backups. Given that local backups really need say 2.5 times (read somewhere) C + D I need to rethink. Do I need to account for Logs? Ah, yes I am also using SEP and heard that takes a chunk (of C!

Any advice appreciated before I set my partitions.

Thanks for your time.

 

[markdmac]

My company has set the following standard for any servers we build.

1. 100GB partition for OS
2. 50GB partition for unimportant files
3. remaining disk space for data partition and installation files.


We have found it is important to create that second partition so you can have a place to exclude things from backup. The native SBS backup or ShadowProtect backup that we use both work on entire volumes. Since we replicate backups offsite and our customers pay for that storage it was important to be able to restrict the backup to just real data and not have the customer wasting backup space on files such as service packs that can easily be downloaded again if needed. Your mileage may vary but consider doing something similar.

Unless your drives are on separate RAID sets, there really isn't a performance increase if you separate your Exchange database from its logs.

Typically our customers have just ordered 3 disks, so we have one large RAID 5 partition configured on the RAID Controller, and then within that drive we create our 3 partitions.

I hope that helps.

Regards,

Mark

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