Spec for server to run Exchange and very little else

[tosca925]

What sort of minimum spec should i be looking for for a server that purely runs Exchange 2003. It has 200 mailboxes with no plans to add to this. This servers role will ideally only be Exchange.

I don't think we will be going to Exchange 2007 (can't warrant spending the money for what we use it for)at this time but our current exchange box is on its last legs and also out of warranty. We will leave the old exchange box online as it will carry on doing other tasks till it dies.

Must be Rackmount

[steveg]

Our dedicated exchange box (almost a year old now) is:

2 x dual core xeon 5110 - 1.6ghz
2gb ram
3 x 15000 rpm SAS hdd

Supports 350 mailboxes, and to be honest could be half the spec and would still run fine. Only thing I'll upgrade in the future is the ram.

Any preference on the supplier? How email intensive are the users? 200 staff mailboxes that are used every day will be very different to 200 primary school pupil accounts that are accessed 2 times a term. What is the spec of your exisiting box? Maybe run performance monitor on this for a few days to see how heavily utilised it is.

Steve

[Busybub]

Ours uses a Xeon 2.0 with 1gb PC2100 and 3*36gb SCSI drives. It's about 4 years old.

We have about the same number of mailboxes so I can't imagine you will have much problem with any of the more recent servers.

[zag]

Ours uses a normal P4 3ghz with 2gb of memory.

You really don't need massive hardware to run exchange an exchange box.

[Ashers]

Dell education services are giving some high specs at good prices, we are upgrading our admin network this summer, they are all twin quad core processors with 4 or 8GB of Ram for under £1800 each, the hard drive sizes vary depending on what we are asking the server to do.

Also have you thought about using the server as a fax server as well, I've just started researching the possibilities, but there is plenty of software that intergrates straight in to Exchange for sending and recieving of faxes.

[john]

I have a Xeon 3.2ghz in mine with 4gb ram, all I can say is if you use Outlook Web Access much then you need as much ram as you can.

[k-strider]

I think any new ish Server will run it fine.. the main thing is RAM at least 2GB and disk space is down to how you want to limit the mail box sizes.

our exchange server is a 1U Intel server. it now has 4GB (now) in and a dual Xeon HT procs.. can’t remember the speed... but the CPUs aren't taxed. it also is our Share Point Portal server. We got just a mirrored SATA drives in there and its fine. it supports about 700 Mail boxes.

before its RAM upgrade it had 2GB and it was on the limit (but it ran both Exchange and Sharepoint (which had an SQL instance too)

Exchange 2007 is a bit different. it idles at about 3GB (2GB immediately after boot but a few days later) and on this test server its only got about 5 Mailboxes - the Web Access is nice in 2K7 though!!

[k-strider]

I guess you know already but if its Exchange 2003 it HAS to go on a 32 bit Win2k/2k3 server and therefore theres no point buying more than 4GB of ram.