Re: Installing Exchange for performance

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

First of all I recommend gooing to www.microsoft.com/exchange and looking for the design and deployment documenation becuase it is excellent and will give you an understanding of the questions you seek.

First of all you will want to carry out an audit of your current users, how do they use email, how many mails are sent and received, what are you mailbox limits, what are your connector limits, do you have any legislative requirements to keep or track messages? From this you can create a typical user profile based on IOPS per second.

From the basic information you have provided so far you have one physical
disk for the OS in two logical partitions. Then I would use one physical disk for the transaction logs, these are just as important as your database if not more so. One physical volume for your databases and finally the last physical disk for your queues. It si difficult these days as disk are actually two big, 74GB for transaction logs and queues it way too much. As an indication our current 5.5 environment has databases around 150GB and we have transaction log drives of 33GB, normally we generate around 5GB transactions per day. Our user profile is heavy.

Don't worry about the MTA unless you need to provide backward support for 5.5. Exchange 2003 doesn't use the MTA and in fact a recent Technet article has been released discussing how it can be sutdown.

Hope this gives you are starting point,

PaulB
"ADMIN@CB" <ADMINCB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:C5EC6843-A3A5-4A73-8C9E-40DA56ACF32F@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
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
> :)
>




.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Partition questions
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    (microsoft.public.exchange.design)
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    ... Hmm...what if it turned out that no backups had been running on server ... and all transaction logs since Day 1 of the Exchange 2007 server ... These logs are cleared by a backup but without a backup, ... Would the mailbox be recoverable then by chance? ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)
  • Re: Installing Exchange for performance
    ... Once you figure out the mailbox storage quotas (how large you'll allow each ... >> Not sure what you mean by 4 pairs of mirrored RAID drives... ... >>> What is the better way to setup the partitions for running Exhange, ... >>> Exchange server in 6 months time, because the users are telling us it's ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.setup)
  • Re: Unlikely performance issues
    ... the following disk configuration: ... has the search catalog + paging file + public databases ... Avarage mailbox has 7000 items and is ... should move my transaction logs to another disk. ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)
  • Cluster/Disk Question
    ... We have a 2 node active/passive Exch 2003 cluster. ... disk managment and break the two partitions for present trans logs and RSG. ... use the whole partition for the transaction logs. ... Do we need downtime to make these changes to the disk drives on the cluster? ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange2000.general)