Well I may as well start putting #1 on these articles rather than assuming I will only do one (famous last words?).
“How big should my mail store be? Microsoft says 50GB for Exchange 2003 or 100GB for Exchange 2007 and 200GB in particular circumstances.”
It isn’t a hard and fast rule and the real answer (unfortunately) is “It depends”.
Let’s go to extremes…
2 users with a 50GB mailbox each and you have the choice of 1 or 2 mail stores (obviously in the same storage group, see earlier article). With 1 store you are risking hitting a 100GB store size if there is no single instance effect. However, consider the process of emailing a 10MB document from one user to the other.
Single store. 10MB of transaction logs are generated for the email plus 10MB of store traffic / changes / increase in store size if there is no white space.
Two stores. 10MB of transaction logs are generated in EACH store plus 10MB of store traffic / changes / increase in store size if there is no white space in EACH store.
However, going to the other extreme, 1,000 employees with draconian 50MB mailboxes each would give you a mathematical 50GB store assuming no single instance effect. The performance hit of everyone hitting one store with one set of logs would be sizeable as would the impact of losing that store.
A happy and healthy compromise needs to be reached.
1 comment:
Of course, that depends largely on your restoration SLAs. Certain backup application providers can't meet 50GB in an hour. Certain other providers can meet 200 or 300GB inside 2 minutes.
Size matters.
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