Re: Hardware specs question

Exchange Server Standard (5, 2000, and 2003) were all limited to 16GB per
store (pub & priv are seperate stores). Exchange 2003 SP2 has raised that
limit to a possible 75GB. The SP does not automatically increase the size, a
regedit is required.
http://www.vladville.com/articles/exchangesp2sbs2003.asp

You can designate the partition/folder for the store files (priv.edb,
priv.stm, pub.edb & pub.stm) during installation as long as the location is
made available before this part of setup is reached (ie. install base OS
into first partition, when the SBS setup portion starts, pause, format
additional partition(s)). The logfiles can only be moved after Exchange
installation is complete.

I've already commented about the location of the stores, I won't flog the
idea.

There are real benefits to having seperate drives for the logfiles vs store.
1) if the store drive is corrupted or fails but the log drive is OK you can
remount last night's store and replay the logs to bring it up to current. 2)
by seperating the drives you increase the rate at which things can be
written to both sets of files. NOTE: most of this relies on the store and
logfiles being on seperate spindles, ie. physical HDDs. There is a
possibility of corruption of a single partition of many spread over a RAID
array but it is more likely to affect all such partitions. BTW the 'log'
drive, on seperate spindles, should be formatted FAT32 and exclusively used
for the logfiles as writes to the logs are sequential (if you wish to gain
the greatest performance).

A 20GB system drive has enough space for the maximum paging file for Windows
2003 Server. A regedit allows multiple paging files on one partition but it
is normally better for performance to create a 2nd paging file on an
additional partition, NOT on the same RAID array. This can only be done
after the base OS is installed.

gotta run, work to do. Comments welcome.

"Richard" <not@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eH6DYiNLGHA.3280@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The drive space or separate partition for exchange seems to be one of
considerable discussion. How does this so called 16GB exchange limit I've
read about fit into all this?
When SBS is installed, do i have the option to install the logs/mail
queue/pagefile in these partitions our do you move all this stuff after
the
fresh install?
BTW, I am not sure my old Dell 4600 hardware will provide RAID10.

Thanks
Richard


"Leonid S. Knyshov" <lknyshov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:WuadnQA9qLkHlHTeRVn-sQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Richard" <not@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uRZKSF$KGHA.668@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
All,
Followed this thread with great interest. Have used sbs since V4.0, now
we
are ready to migrate from sbs2000 to sbs2003 and want to avoid the out
of
disk space problem that has happened on each version over time. Current
sbs2000 OS partition is 8GB and ran out of space in year 4. New
hardware
is
eight 32 GB drives. Based on what I'm reading here, looks like i should
set
up two for the RAID1 OS, the other six as RAID 5 for data. But what
about
the exchange DB? Should it be on a separate partition?
Thanks for helping.
Richard



Nice choice of hardware.

RAID 1 for System
RAID 10 for Exchange DB/Data across 6 drives where the Exchange data
store
partition is about 40GB (but leave the Exchange stores limited to about
30GB
or so), and the rest of the disk is a data partition. Alternatively, if
you
do not have a large mail retention requirement (we are up to 75GB/store
now), RAID 1 for Exchange, RAID 5 for data.
RAID 1 for transaction logs/mail queue/pagefile

You'd want Exchange DB on a separate partition to be assured that your
data
won't fill up the space it needs to operate.

Reasons:

1. System data should always be separate, in case something runs away and
starts writing a ton of data
2. RAID10 on Exchange provides you with maximum resiliency
3. Transaction logs can be used to recover the system in case the
Exchange
database becomes logically corrupt. They are tiny, so it makes sense to
also
separate mailqueue there as well.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov, CEO
Crashproof Solutions, LLC - http://www.crashproofsolutions.com
MCP Exchange 2003/Small Business Server 2003, CCNA, SCSA 8, NCIE
Microsoft Small Business Specialist Partner






.

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