Exchange 2007 Storage Groups

This one also came up a couple of times at the community launch so I thought I'd put finger to keyboard on this too.

Rules of thumb for your Exchange 2007 server:

Processor: Almost irrelevant. Two processors. Xeon or whatever your preferred class is callsed these days.

RAM: 4GB of RAM is dirt cheap. 8GB of RAM is only a few hundred more. 16GB of RAM will make things really fly.

Hard drives: You might be able to get 36GB hard drives but you'd have to look quite hard. 73GB drives are a real minimum for servers and you tend to get 6 or 8 internally. Even as three mirrors you get 73GB for the TLs and 73GB for the store. For a tiny shop that should be ok for a while. In real terms, hard drives are a pittance.

Give an example. OK...

Dell Poweredge 2950. Rack mount. Fast. Shut up Mark. Two dual core Xeon 5160 processors at 3Ghz, 4MB cache, 1.33Ghz FSB. 16GB of RAM, 6 x 73GB 15k SAS drives on a PERC 5/i controller, PERC 5E RAID adapter on a PCI-X bus, Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 edition, Dual power supply, 3 year turbo warranty on a sesame seed bun.

PowerVault direct attached RAID array with 14 of the 73GB hard drives. Dual power supply and the same 3 year turbo warranty.

The 2 boxes ought to be around the 7k mark and will give you enough room for certainly 500GB of Exchange databases. That is £14 per GB of emails. Not much really is it?

So now you have some daft spec box, let's carve it up.

Storage groups. Up to 50 of them.
Stores. Up to 50 per storage group.
Caveat. Maximum of 50 stores in TOTAL.

Each store should be a maximum of 100GB (up from 50GB in Exchange 2003). If you quota your mailboxes at 2GB each and even with no SIS you are looking at 50 users per store or 2,500 users per server. Anyone implementing a single server for 2,500 users needs a good kicking anyway.

RAM for your server should be at least 1GB for every 2 storage groups rounded UP to the nearest even number. Add at least another one for LCR. There is a recommended maximum of 8GB of RAM for multi role servers but the explanation is too confusing for my poor old brain.