Hardware recommendations for an Exchange server

[Loco3KGT]

I've been tasked with doing a pricelist of hardware for a recent corporate acquisition. And honestly I have no experience with Exchange and the amount of overhead that may or may not be required for running it as an email server. So, I'm hoping someone can make some recommendations as to a CPU/RAM/HD setup for me to go price out.

This server is going to be for approximately 250 people, probably a moderate amount of emails going with and assume a decent amount of file attachments. I would typically generically go with something like a dual proc / 4gb RAM / large RAID5 setup, but that's just a knee jerk reaction.

Thoughts?

 

[Atheus]

Originally posted by: Loco3KGT
dual proc / 4gb RAM / large RAID5 setup

I also have no experience with exchange, but that sounds like massive overkill. I would only go dual processor for redundancy, and only if it was cheap - CPU won't be the bottleneck and it doesn't have to respond to every single request within nanoseconds like some servers. I would probably go for 1GB ECC RAM and a simple RAID 1 setup with 2*250GB drives.

If 99.9999% uptime is absolutely nescesary I might get dual CPUs, dual PSUs, dual network connections, etc... honestly though, RAID and ECC should be enough.

 

[RebateMonger]

Actually, Exchange can be both CPU and disk intensive. If you start doing SPAM, Spyware, and Virus scans of incoming mail, that takes a lot of CPU effort. And high email traffic and database operations keep that disk working pretty hard too.

Be sure to get plenty of disk space. If you have to do a manual defrag or repair of the database, you'll want local empty disk space that is 110% the size of your database. Doing a defrag across the network sucks.

 

[JDMnAR1]

I would say that your knee is fairly accurate. All of our Exchange boxes currently have dual procs and 4GB of RAM, and all of the mail store is on fibre-attached SAN drives. While it may seem like a distant consideration, you might want to go ahead and spec out 64-bit hardware if it is in the budget. The next version of Exchange is going to be 64-bit only (unless Microsoft waffles).

 

[Atheus]

Originally posted by: JDMnAR1
All of our Exchange boxes currently have dual procs and 4GB of RAM, and all of the mail store is on fibre-attached SAN drives.

Looks like I was wrong then.

How many users and how many servers?

 

[stash]

Here's some docs that might help:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodte...f-404a-93e0-b74077e3d013.mspx?mfr=true
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodte...1-4ad4-9e59-4ab0fc24cb02.mspx?mfr=true
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/top10perf.mspx

 

[JDMnAR1]

Originally posted by: Atheus

Originally posted by: JDMnAR1
All of our Exchange boxes currently have dual procs and 4GB of RAM, and all of the mail store is on fibre-attached SAN drives.

Looks like I was wrong then.

How many users and how many servers?

Not counting peripheral servers (i.e. junkmail, etc) 10 servers (5 NLB clusters), ~13K mailboxes