Partitioning for Exchange 2003

[blure007]

Anyone know where I can find some information on how I should go about partitioning a server for Exchange 2003? I have 715GB and need to find the best way of partitioning it for exchange. TIA

 

[alent1234]

how many physical drives do you have, how many users and what kind of limits?

where I work I'm bringing up a new server because of a merger and the company that bought us is going onto our network

1000 users we are going to have 5 servers

1 OWA
3 mailbox servers
1 SMTP relay to the SMTP gateway/connector server

Two mailbox servers are 18GB RAID1 for OS partition
40GB for IS
10GB for logs with only 500MB in daily logs


New server is going to be 100GB for IS and around 5GB for logs

From what I read MS recommends RAID1 arrays for the IS volumes because of the I/O

 

[n0cmonkey]

Keep the data and the OS on seperate drive arrays. RAID5 SCSI is the basic option, although a raid 10 would be even better for the data.

 

[blure007]

We have about 100 user but the company is growing quickly.
WE have 4 Hitachi 250GB SATA drives on a LSI SATA Raid card partitioned for the databases and logs and OS

 

[n0cmonkey]

Drop the SATA and get SCSI.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm not too familiar with Exchange, but our Windows base build uses a mirror for the OS (2x18G or 2x36G depending on what's in your price range and such) and the rest is one big RAID 5 for data. If the Exchange logs cause a lot of disk activity it would probably be a good idea to seperate them too, so you would need at least 3 sets of physical drives. 1 for the OS mirror, 1 for the Exchange database and 1 for the Exchange logs. If you do RAID 5 for the 2 data volumes that means you need at least 8 disks.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Microsoft recommends at least 5 volumes. You can find the recommended configuration on their site.

Data
Logs
Swap file
SMTP Queues
OS

Essentially like that. But you'll need 10+ drives and probably a couple PCI-X RAID controllers. If I had hella users, I'd go with some kind of SAN on the backend.