Greetings all,

Let me first start off by saying I work in an environment where I wear a variety of hats.  Network Administration, System Administration, Infrastructure design and implementation, backups, Email admin(by no means am I an exchange admin, but have recovered from outages etc..).  You name it I do it.  With that said its tough to focus on one area, but at this point I need to.  We currently host Exchange 2007, we have about 230 mailboxes with a 5G quota. Currently we are using about 284 GB of space with regards to our databases.  I am in the process of getting together the sizing requirements for our 2013 Exchange build.

We currently run our exchange servers (1 mailbox server, 1 CAS + HUB) on VMware.  We would like to have our new environment run on VMware as well.   From my research and using the sizing calculator, I am getting a bit confused on best practices. 

I am going to run in a multi-server role configuration for the new build.

Question 1:  Should my logs be on the same volume as my OS?  I prefer to separate this out.  Exchange calculator has recommended the following: 2 volumes for DB's, 4 DB' per volume and 2 volume's for my logs.  I would assume and additional volume for my OS?  This is what I have come up with: 2TB for database volumes, 350 GB for logs, and 120 OS volume. This assumes growth for the next 5 years with 10% growth year over year.

Question 2:  I don't have a separate site but would like to have some form of HA.  When I fill out the calculator and another mailbox server and DAG it appears my volume requirement grows to nearly 7TB.  I expected my size requirements to double for my secondary server and adding a file share witness.  I expected more like a 5TB volume requirement between both servers.  Also, it switches to a 2 volume requirement per server, putting a 1 DB+logs on each volume.  This would make my databases huge.

 What am I missing?  

I feel my implementation being relatively small.  A single mulit-server role configuration is tempting for simplicity, but I feel HA is to good to pass up. 

Thanks for any advice or recommendations

Joe

These points don't speak directly to your questions, but they may be of general help. Separate from the database transaction logs, be aware that 2013 generates quite a lot of logs for all of the normal operations, far, far more than 2007. These typically reside where you install the Exchange server software, so make sure that volume has extra space on it, or move them off to another volume.

Each mailbox database does checksums every 24 hours, so that's going to generate several mbytes/second for many hours out of the day, per database. If you do a DAG with 2 copies of every database, that just doubled the activity on the hard drives. Various articles now point to having fewer databases that are much larger to keep the hard drives from being overloaded. We've had to redesign our SAN solution after we migrated, realizing that using VMWare was a bad idea. We should have just gone bare metal. The Exchange 2013 HA makes VMWare's HA redundant and takes away necessary IOPS.

Hi,

Thanks for these points.  Any details on why VMware was a bad idea?  Seems like everyone is doing this now.

Joe

Hi Joe,

Thank you for your question.

Question1:

With Exchange 2013, we could place the database and log in same volume, we suggest you separate them. However, we didnt suggest you place DB on OS volume.

Question2:

Because your requirement is long for 5 years and have 5G quota. And DAG will have a database in the DAG member, So the database will be increased to 7TB, we could decrease the personal quota less than 5 G to achieve 5 TB requirement.

If there are any questions regarding this issue, please be free to let me know. 

Best Regard,

Jim

Hi,

Thanks for these points.  Any details on why VMware was a bad idea?  Seems like everyone is doing this now.