Upgraded to Enterprise Edition, what now?

[scottew]

I recently upgraded from Exchange 2003 Standard to the Enterprise Edition which was pretty painless. Now that we have upgraded, I am looking to get the best performance out of our current set up.

Dell PowerEdge 2950
4GB RAM
4 x 73GB SCSI Hard Drives (RAID 5)
c: (OS) 25GB (15GB Free Space)
d: (Programs) 180GB (95GB Free Space)

I currently have 1 Storage Group with the Exchange Database and Transaction Logs located in d:\program files\Exchsrvr\MBDATA.

I now know that this isn't the best set up, but I didn't know any better 2 years ago when this server was originally set up.

Now that I have upgraded, I am wondering what is the best course of action. Should I set up additional storage groups and databases the move mailboxes to those databases? If so, should I create different directories for each of the storage groups.

Unfortunately, purchasing any new hardware is not an option so I have to do the best with what I currently have in place.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Scott

 

[58sniper]

You don't mention how big your databases are now, so it's hard to say. Moving some mailboxes to another store on the same drives doesn't do much for performance (same mailboxes, same spindles), but you might be better of from a restore standpoint if you have a problem with one store.

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/

 

[scottew]

Right now our database is almost 74GB

priv1.edb = 42,890,632 kb
priv1.stm = 31,008,776 kb

 

[58sniper]

Assuming minimal whitespace, I'd be inclined to leave it the way it is.

I think Zelandakh's mailbox is bigger than that!

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/

 

[scottew]

Thanks Pat. Right now there is about 1 GB of whitespace according to the event logs which I checked this morning.

Thanks,
Scott

 

[Zelandakh]

Nah - my stores get to that size (do as I say, not as I do) but my mailboxes never topped 8.1GB.

Now that I've changed companies, the limit is 50MB for most staff. Talk about dark ages!!

 

[58sniper]

50MB?! I've got that much in my Contacts!

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]

I haven't got enough friends for that ... :-(

 

[58sniper]

Hey - when you tie the photos to the Contacts, it adds up. I've even got your smiling face, Nick.

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/