We are on Exchange 2k3 and using thick provisioned disk from SAN. Storage team is recommending us to move the DBs and logs to a new set of disk which is created using thin provisioning. Also, Storage team will be creating the new set of disks on a pool and will configure LUN from this pool. What will be your recommendation on sharing pool with any other iops intensive application like VMWare? Is it recommended to use disk from an over utilized pool (Storage team will be configuring 150% over allocation for the pool ) Cheerio ShabaCheers Shaba

Here is the article which will answer your question. http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/10/11/240868.aspx Cheers,Gulab | MCTS-MCITP Messaging: 2010 | MCTS-MCITP Messaging: 2007 | MCC 2011 | Skype: Gulab.Mallah

Hi Shaba, Above gave some goode suggestion? Any other question, please feel free tell us. Regards! Gavin TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

The link from Gulab is good to help you understand disk sizing but heres the thing on Thin Provisioning. CAUTION!!!! Oversimplification for illustrative purposes. Your Mileage WILL vary. Not to be used as gospel. This is not holy writ. Each of your LUNs has to have around 20% free space for NTFS. So if you have 10 stores at 100GB the LUNs are all 120GB. Minimum. That means you have 200GB of space that cannot be used by anything at all. If you thin provisioned the LUNs youre going to be able to get 180GB of space back because youre not assigning physical space for storage you are never, ever, going to use. The IOPS implications here arent as simple you might think. The solutions are built to suit IOPS or capacity, whichever is greater. In 2003 it was always IOPS that was the defining factor and in 2010 its capacity. You would have got less mileage out of a thinly provisioned 2003 environment because you were always struggling to get spindles to make the solution. Space didnt matter too much. Of course, in the E2000 timeframe the disks were small and you could have done with that space back, but I digress. In Exchange 2010 you have demands from users for more storage but dont have a lot of IOPS so you want to maximise the amount of email you can get on the disk. If you think DAS for a moment you have a 1TB disk which if actually only ~900GB or so in size and your store cant be much more than 700GB because the LUN needs to be 840GB. The storage team WILL NOT be hosting your Exchange load on the same disks as other loads. The whole point is to give Exchange what it needs on the disks it needs, not to waste tons of space. Talk to your vendor or their partner on this. If your vendor is NetApp you can email me direct (marnold@<that company dot com> and I can assist your partner if they need that help. I will not tread on toes so make sure that your partner is in good shape. "-Shaba-" wrote in message news:43a8fd6f-f247-4765-b0db-a078f1555578... We are on Exchange 2k3 and using thick provisioned disk from SAN. Storage team is recommending us to move the DBs and logs to a new set of disk which is created using thin provisioning. Also, Storage team will be creating the new set of disks on a pool and will configure LUN from this pool. What will be your recommendation on sharing pool with any other iops intensive application like VMWare? Is it recommended to use disk from an over utilized pool (Storage team will be configuring 150% over allocation for the pool ) Cheerio Shaba Cheers Shaba Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.

Thanks Mark. We have decided not to go for thin provisioning at this moment. Cheers ShabaCheers Shaba