Hi, i am looking for a design recommendation for an Exchange 2007 Deployment for 1000 to 2000 mail boxes in a university environment. If you may please specify the diffrent server roles needed (Mail box, Client access, Hub transport, Edge transport) and the amount of servers needed for each role. Also will MS 2003 Server R2 (64 bit) Enterprise or standard be required for this exchange deployment? any morerecommendations about this design are welcome.

RaedH: This is a very open question and extremely hard to answer and you can get dozens of answers, which can all be right and wrong at the same time. Designing a solution and selecting roles, number of servers, placement, etc are decisions that should be requirement driven. Scaling Exchange is an important task that requires background information and data collection such as: What is the projected growth of the environment? What are the current and projectedI/O requirements for storage? What is the fabric of your user-base (LAN? WAN? Remote?). What are the peak times/loads? Budget? ...and so on and so on. These are important questions that I encourage you to start pursuing. There are a myriad of resources online and offline, but for starters, you may want to start here: MS Exchange 2007 Planning MS Exchange 2007 Deployment Resources Some answers that I can provide you is that: 1. Yes, Exchange requires 64 bit hardware 2. You need MS Windows 2003 R2 X64 (either Standard or Enterprise) 3. You will need all roles, except for Unified Messaging. You should plan for redundancy and performance in determining number and makeup of the servers Other than that, I would only be speculating and that will be less useful in the long term. Start reading. Good luck, Allen Firouz

This design is based fora university campus, it will be deployed on a LAN (10/100/1000) and provide email access on the university computers (200 terminals) and access over the WEB. Current deployment will be needed for 1000 users with growth up to 2000 with in the coming 2 years. Cisco Firewall (ASA5510) will be deployed for security and DMZ setup. Internet speed of 4 Mbps. Each user will be given up to 40 Mbps for students (1850) and 100 Mbps forFaculty (150) would this information be sufficient? I would like to ask What is ment by I/O requirements for storage ?

RaedH, Well, it's a start. If you really are looking for a starting point, this would be my generic starting point with just the information provided: two Mailbox servers in an Active/Passiveclustered environment two servers in a cluster, (mainly for load balancing), hosting the Hub Transport role and Client Access role one Edge Transport server in your DMZ for routing and front-end access. I recommend providing access to email through OWA and not using a fat client (Outlook). The new OWA has all the functionality of Outlook, without the bloat. The only downfall is that the client needs to have internet/LAN connectivity in order to access their mail and calendar. IF the client needs offline mail and calendar access, then they would have to use Outlook (and setting up Outlook Anywhere [RPC over HTTPS] is ideal for access without VPN). I/Ops stands for I/O per second, which means how heavily your storage is getting hit with read/writes. Regardless of how fast your servers are, as your usage increases, your I/Ops will decrease and without proper scaling, it leads to slow downs and deteriorated performance. For this reason, the preferred shared storage is a SAN, which handles read/writes very well and can be scaled seamlessly and easily. Read this doc on IO optimization for Exchange. Ensure security and redundancy on all your systems. Make sure anything front-facing is secured via SSL and manage access. Good luck, -Allen Firouz

Thank you Allen for your help and support. i have2 Final questions regarding this issue, For the mail box clustering, would i need MS Server 2003 R2 Enterprise and Exchange 2007 Enterprise in order to do the clustering or will standard do. and finaly on which server role do i need to deploy Forefront for exchage ? is it just on the Edge transport and Mail Box roles or on all roles. Best Regards, Raed

anyone has an update to the final questions ? thank you, Raed

I personally prefer that the message hygine services exist on edge and mail router/hub servers, not mail database servers.

I believe that clustering is supported only on Enterprise or Datacenter version of Windows server.http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/dba487bf-61b9-45af-b927-e2333ec810b61033.mspx?mfr=true

Hi Raed, To use Windows clustering you will need Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Exchange Enterprise Edition (The Mailbox Server roleis the only reason for Exchange Enterprise Edition on the servers) The best practice for a Forefront installation would be on the Edge, Hub Transport and Mailbox server. As the Forefront AV will stamp the messages as they are scanned, this will reduce the same message being rescanned every single time. Your Edge server and Hub transport will do most of the scanning. If you had lots of users hosted on the Mailbox server and cannot afford the CPU overhead that comes with AV scanning you could leave AV off the Mailbox server role but that would be a risk versus cost business decision. Forefront does get hungry for CPU/Memory so you should test how this will effect your environment when sizing the servers. Cheers, Rhys