How much did your Exchange 2010 mailbox store size increase by?

I'm planning out what disks I'm going to need to create on our VMWare setup for Exchange 2010 at the moment; bearing in mind we have to eager-zero thick format the VMDKs I don't want to be putting 100s of GB of unused space on there so looking more closely at current usage.

As it stands we have on-premise Exchange for staff and Live@Edu for students... mail store isn't that big, 28GB for one database and 20GB for the other. Thing is I'm expecting this to grow when upgrading to 2010 due to the lack of single instance storage; question is how much to expect! Currently the physical server has 320GB storage for databases, with around 170GB free.

I know our users store quite a lot of attachments and I'd imagine there's quite a few multiple copies of attachments around so with that in mind I'm wondering if to create a VMDK per database, one for OS drive and one for logs. Not sure whether to go with 50GB or 100GB... certainly the latter gives much more room for expansion moving fowards. As for the log drive... 50GB?

This is for around 100 active users (there's about 300 accounts but some are used a lot more than others)

I guess to some extent having the server on VMWare does make the disk sizing less of a worry as I should be able to extend the storage VMDK in future if required but would prefer to not have to do anything like that if I can help it :)

Would be interested to hear from experiences of those who have moved from 2007 - 2010 and how your mailbox database sizes changed during the upgrade (and indeed how quickly they're growing since!)

Not entirely sure about the expantion between 2007 and 2010 but the 100GB is certainly safer and running full backups will keep the size down a lot.

Veeam will be running every night so should take care of the backup side of things :)

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Originally Posted by gshaw

Veeam will be running every night so should take care of the backup side of things :)

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Yea you just need to make sure that exchange is aware of it otherwise it will not run defrags and concatinate the logs etc properly. An exchange aware backup application will run cosistancy checks, concat the logs and do other stuff. If you don't have an aware backup app use Windows Server backup with the VSS Full backup rather than copy backup operation otherwise your DB will bloat.

Veeam may have that but just make sure as you may well save a bunch of space and make exchange quicker if you make sure it runs its appropriate checks.

From what I remember of reading on the support forums it does do log maintenance etc as part of the application aware backup process. I know Veeam use the VSS writers so think it does do the processes correctly, won't hurt to double and triple check before we get there though.

1. There will still be an increase so expect that, there isnt actually a formula as such but you can expect at the min of 20%. SIS was lost ion 2007, only attachments were kept, now this has been removed from 2010 too so there isnt going to be that much of an increase. If from 2003 then yes, there would be.
2. Dumpster changes in exch 2010 will also contribute towards the increase in storage, exch 2010 dumpster v 2.0 ismore disk hungry.
3. If you have quotas and semd.receive lmits in place then I wouldnt worry, but plan and make sure it meets your RPO/RTO SLA.

Sukh