Re: Realistic drive arrays
- From: Missing Link <MissingLink@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 01:06:45 -0800
Thanks for that, a triple mirror set was one of my considerations
particularly on the servers I have specified. One of the problems I have is
that two of the servers only have 5 36Gb drives. I didn't specify these ones
myself and I can get a 6th drive in to do the triple mirror setup but I am
concerned about only 36Gb in a DR situation where I may need more than one
copy of the database on the disk. As an alternative I was going to mirror 1
pair for the logs, raid 5 with partitions using 3 disks for the rest which
gives some redundancy then define the 6th drive as a hot swap spare for both
arrays. I know this does not give me the performance of a mirror but does
increase the contiguous disk space available, given the number of users and
that few of them are heavy mail users performance should not be an issue.
With adequate memory how much does Exchange make use of the swap file?
I would rate the I/O capability of this as of equal to the logs.
"John Fullbright" wrote:
> Three mirrors, excellent answer. I would add, you could create additional
> partitions on Physical disk 0 for the bulk of your page file, and the system
> temp director and smtp queues. This doesn't do anything for IO load, but
> does help reduce fragmentation.
>
>
> "Hobdey" <Hobdey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:ACA9B76B-7DAC-4148-8575-4F82D324F07A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Personally with the 6 drives in question, I would run 3 mirrored sets: 1
> > for
> > the OS and Exchange executables (also leaving the default SMTP directories
> > on
> > this set), 1 for the data stores (EDB and STM files), and 1 for the
> > database
> > log files.
> >
> > Even if you don't go that way, make certain you mirror your OS partition
> > because even though there's not much activity there, a disk loss would be
> > a
> > serious pain to recover from. Plus, as I alluded to, the default location
> > for the SMTP queue directories is on that partition as well and there's a
> > fair amount of activity there. I wouldn't do anything with RAID 5 in your
> > situation because you don't have the disks to spare.
> >
> > "Missing Link" wrote:
> >
> >> I am looking for documents giving realistic recommendations for drive
> >> array
> >> configurations for exchange server 2003 for and organisation with a
> >> maximum
> >> of 150 users per server in a distributed network Many that I have found
> >> give
> >> proposals that require at least 8 drives, one if you followed it through
> >> wanted 22!!
> >>
> >> Both Dell and HP sell servers that have 6 drives, what is the best way to
> >> split these up for a mailbox server. The "Tuning Exchange Server 2003
> >> Performance" chapter refers to an smtp bridgehead as using one partition
> >> with
> >> mirroring if available. I would have split the single array drive into a
> >> number of partitions if only to reduce fragmentation, what does anyone
> >> else
> >> think. Is there any real benefit using a mirror for the O/S over a raid 5
> >> array as once it us loaded there should be little O/S activity in
> >> comparison.
> >>
> >> Alan
>
>
>
.
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