I have a client with Exchange 2003 Standard with about 50 mail boxes and their store is currently about 22 GB. One of their circumstances is they rely heavily on email. Once uses learn what they can do. John T From: exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Todd Lemmiksoo Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2007 6:49 AM To: 'exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question John, I'm not a Exchange expert either. All of my experience has been with Exchange 5.5 on NT4, 7 years. I have been reading as many articles about Exchange 2003 as I can. And it is making my head spin. That's why I ask. Its taken this long to get the President to agree to buy a server and Exchange 2003. Running a critical application that is not supported anymore does not phase him. Just the $ cost is all he see's. Yes, this is Exchange standard with 80 mail boxes max. Should I expect the store to be about the same as it is in 5.5? Thanks again, Todd L. _____ From: exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John T (lists) Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 8:26 PM To: exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question Talk about a loaded question... First of all, I am not an Exchange expert. Just so we clear that up. There is a good reason for planning for the store to reach a size 3 times current. If this is Exchange standard, that also means your partition should be equal to 2 times plus 500 mb of the expected store size. The reason is if you have to do a rebuild, by default it uses the same partition. Of course, if you use the command line and read up on the parameters available, the rebuild temp files can be elsewhere. John T From: exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Todd Lemmiksoo Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 4:30 PM To: 'exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question Thanks John T for all your insight and help. Do you have a suggestion for the size of the Exchange 2003 DB partition if my current Exchange 5.5 store is 15 Gb. I would like to be large enough at the start than have to resize the partition later. Todd L. _____ From: exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John T (lists) Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 12:31 PM To: exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question OK, there are 3 levels of configurations: Acceptable, Recommended, Optimal For Exchange, this is roughly how they would go, always of course depending on cituation specifics such as number of mailboxes, expected store size, budget of the company and so forth: Barely Acceptable: 2 SCSI 15K RPM 146 GB hard drives in a RAID1 configuration. Partitions: OS, Page, Logs, Exchange DB, Other Minumum Recommended: 4 SATA hard drives each at least 80 GB in 2 RAID1 configurations: 1st RAID1; OS, Page, Logs. 2nd RAID1; Exchange DB, Other Optimal: 7+ SATA or SCSI or mix of hard drives. 2 RAID1 sets and 1 RAID5 set. 1st RAID1; OS, Logs, Other. 2nd RAID1; Page, Backups. RAID5; Exchange DB John T From: exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Patrick Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 1:25 AM To: exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question John, Thanks for your very clear insight to best storage solution for exchange. Just to add a bit and get a little more clarification. Would it not be best to have OS and Trans Logs on Raid 1 and DB on Raid 5? would that not be a better solution for the read and write issue? According to an MS publication I once read, they recommend you have Trans Logs and DB's on different physical disks, and if you decide to implement storage groups, you are adviced to have each storage group and trans logs on different partitions as well. Just wondering how one can achieve that without your exchange implementation being extremely expensive. ----- Original Message ---- From: John T (lists) <johnlist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 11:38:52 PM Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question Responding on list as it is good information for all. Each type of RAID has goods and bads. The downside to RAID5 is it is slower on writes, as it must not only decide where to put the data but also must calculate and then write the checksum on the x drive. However, nothing can beat RAID5 on reads. While I understand your concern about drive space overhead, you have to take a look at the larger picture. In your information, you state the server is also going to be a file server. If at all possible, I would suggest using a different server for that, or using an external storage device such as one that has 4 drives and is configured as RAID5 so the OS only sees the virtual drive. Getting back to Exchange, there is a lot of writing going on, both to the Exchange DB files as well as the transaction logs, therefore they are both better suited to be on RAID1 sets. Same thing with your page file partition, a lot of writing and reading is done there. For a partition holding files for storage, there is not a lot of writing going on so RAID5 is fine. Same thing with a SQL database. The Database writing is done in chunks, where is most of the IO is reads, so SQL databases are often on RAID5, but the transaction logs are never on RAID5. John T From: Jason Davis [mailto:JDavis@xxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 3:22 PM To: 'johnlist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: RE: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question Hi John, Please forgive my ignorance.... I was reading your email regarding Exchange Server fault-tolerant recommendations. What is the reason for 4 physical drives in 2 RAID-1 sets? Currently, we are building a new Exchange Server which contains 4, 150GB drives. We were planning on using RAID-5 whereby we would have a total of 450GB free disk space (since we would effectively lose the 1 drive due to striping). If we go with 2 RAID-1 sets, we are down to 300GB free disk space...... Keep in mind that we want to use this as a File Server in addition to an Exchange Server. Is that recommended? How do you feel about us implementing RAID-5 instead? Thanks for your time! (I hope you don't mind me emailing you directly) --Jason Davis _____ From: John T (lists) [mailto:johnlist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 2:35 PM To: exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question For an Exchange server, recommendation is minimum 4 physical drives in 2 RAID1 sets. First RAID1 set: OS partition, Page file partition, Logs partition Second RAID1 set: Exchange DB partition, Backup partition John T From: exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Todd Lemmiksoo Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 2:23 PM To: 'exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question Yes, raid 1 = 2 physical drives. _____ From: exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael B. Smith Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 4:40 PM To: exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ExchangeList] Re: Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question You have a SINGLE 73 GB drive? From: exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:exchangelist-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Todd Lemmiksoo Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 4:22 PM To: exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ExchangeList] Exchange 2003 disk partition'g question I will be migrating my Exchange 5.5 org to Exchange 2003 in the near future. (Thanksgiving weekend) And am asking for disk drive partitioning suggestions. Our current Exchange org is taking about 15 Gb of disk space on an NT4 server. I have a 73 Gb drive that I am planning on using for the Exchange 2003 setup. What size partitions should I build for the migration? Todd Lemmiksoo Network Administrator All-Mode Communications, Inc. 1725 Dryden Road Freeville, New York 13068 (607) 347-4164 x440 1-877-ALLMODE (toll free) <http://www.all-mode.com/> http://www.all-mode.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com