Re: Moving to Exchange for the first time
- From: Tee Darling <tee.darling77@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "[ExchangeList]" <exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 11:59:34 -0500
Matt,
First of all, I'll congratulate you of what you're doing for the
school. Your server hardware configuration is "kind of okay" since
Microsoft recommends not having more than 5000 users on an Excahnge
server.
From experience, I would suggest that you buy six or more SCSI
harddrives 72,000 RPM (72,000 RPM drives turn out to be faster than
15,000 RPM). Now I know you would ask why 6 or more drives. Right? The
answer will be how you'll configure the Exchange server. Lets say you
have 7 disks in the Excahnge server: you will configure 2 disks as a
RAID 1 for the OS and where you will install Excahnge files. Two more
disks will be configured as another RAID 1 for where you'll store
Exchange transaction logs. The remaining 3 disks should be configured
as RAID level 5 for your Exchange database files (Users emails). It's
always advisable not to store the transactions log file and the
database files on the same drive or partition. You configure your
exchange in this way for performace.
I know budgets are tight in your case, but if you explain this to the
top officials in the school, they will somehow try to come up with
some more money for the IT Dept to get a better Exchange server for
the school. I hope this will help you while you're still getting
advise from the MSExchange list.
Tony
On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 16:02:00 +0000, Matt Robbins
<mrobbins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> http://www.MSExchange.org/
>
> Hi All,
>
> I am the network manager for a secondary school in England (11-18 year
> olds).
>
> Our current mail system (not Exchange) has gone end-of-life and I am
> looking at Exchange 2003 as a replacement.
>
> We need to support 100 users on Outlook 2003 on laptops - the staff-
> and a further 1200 students using Outlook Web Access. The usage by
> students is relatively light with peaks at the start of the day and at
> lunch and the end of school. All internal communications are carried
> out by email so the staff are somewhat heavier users. We intend to use
> the calendaring features of Exchange for which I have no estimate of
> usage as this is a feature we don't have at the moment.
>
> I have tried using processor and disk usage stats from the present
> system in the "size your server" formulae on the Microsoft Exchange
> website and it doesn't look good for the current mail server.
>
> Budgets are tight (what's new) therefore the server hardware I am
> thinking of would be of the order of twin 2.8GHz Xeon processors, 2GB
> RAM and three 36GB 15,000 RPM drives.
>
> I can honestly say I have no idea whether this will be up to the job so
> could one of you good people cast your experienced eyes over this and
> either congratulate me on an inspired guess or laugh and point! :-)
>
> Many thanks for your time.
>
> Matt Robbins
> Network Manager
> Brooke Weston City Technology College
> P: 01536 396366 F: 01536 396867
>
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