Re: Installing Exchange for performance

OK, I'll attempt to answer your questions:

"Bharat Suneja" wrote:

> Not sure what you mean by 4 pairs of mirrored RAID drives... what raid
> level? and how large are the drives/volumes?
I've got 8 of 74GB SATA Raptor drives. They are paired up using RAID1, so in
effect there are 4 of 74GB logical volumes.
Only the first volume is partitioned, as mentioned, with 20GB for OS,
another 15GB for 2nd OS (to boot into if 1st OS gets a virus, or some sort of
corruption), and the rest of the volume is spare.

>
> Yes, you do want to keep your transaction logs on a separate volume, and
> mirroring (RAID 1) offers better performance because of sequential writes.
>
Is RAID necessary for the transaction logs? and can I use slower, cheaper
drives to store the transaction logs?
On the SATA controller, it is limited to 8 ports, though it is using
PCI-Express and has 128 MB DDR (Intel)


> Hard to comment on actual storage design without knowing more about mailbox
> quotas you intend to allow, deleted item retention, public folders,
> exec/special mailboxes requiring higher quotas, disaster recovery
> requirements, et al... but not sure why you need to use the second volume
> for another instance of the OS.
>
We are looking to use Standard Edition, but am aware of mailbox limitations.
We wont have much in the Public Folders, but will need to keep some of the
user's emails for a long time.
Deleted item retention.....I'm not sure on what we should implement, but I
would like to educate the users to empty out their TRASH cans regularly
anyway (or even be aware that it doesn't last forever????).


Some of the execs will require offline access, using on their laptops, while
most others will use terminal server logins, with outlook 2003 installed for
them to use.


Thanks for the link, I will have a look at that tonight.

Cheers,
>From sunny Townsville, OZ


> Check out optimizing Storage for Exchange Server 2003
> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=C6084D20-9730-4FFC-805D-B957327604C6&displaylang=en
>
> --
> Bharat Suneja
> MCSE, MCT
> --------------------------------
>
>
> "ADMIN@CB" <ADMINCB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:94E011A9-2214-41B7-B5FD-6C855679DF99@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > What is the better way to setup the partitions for running Exhange, with
> > performance in mind?
> > From what I've read so far, I think I need a seperate drive for the
> > transaction logs - how big do these get?
> > needs a partition for each mailbox database (not sure if we are going with
> > Enterprise edition or not).
> > needs a partition for the public folders,
> > needs partitions for the SMTP queues, and MTA stacks.
> >
> > We have over 400 users that will be migrated to this server.
> > We have a new server we are setting up, with dual Xeons, 2GB RAM, and 4
> > pairs of mirrored RAID SATA drives.
> > The first mirror is partitioned for the OS, and a 2nd/backup OS.
> > Not sure how to break up the rest of the mirrors/partitions.
> >
> > Any help here would be appreciated, as we don't wish to restructure the
> > Exchange server in 6 months time, because the users are telling us it's
> > slow.
> >
> > Cheers
> > :)
> >
>
>
>
.

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