Microsoft Exchange 2010 (New Setup - 2000 mailbox)

Right, we currently have a very bad externally host mail solution which I really want to scrap. Now I've had some experience with Exchange 03 before so we have decided that’s the route we would like to take among many other reasons.

Now what information I'm after is basically what are peoples setups with regards to how many servers, split roles, resource allocation (these will be virtual servers, hyper-v) etc.

Give or take we will probably end up with about 2000 mailboxes, I'm only going to have office staff and maybe some other staff on Outlook for now, the rest will use OWA. That could parentally be accessed concurrently by up to 800 machines and that’s just internally (external access, active sync for all the iPhone’s etc etc)

So what would people recommend, I'm going to put the client access roles on a separate VM and then transport and mailbox roles on another VM. These can have anything up to 24 GB ram allocated each if they need it so I have plenty of resources, VHDs will be stored on the SAN (thanks SUN).

Is it worth adding another mailbox/transport server and then setting up a DAG for HA and load sharing?

I'm trying to get some figures from our current e-mail provider about how much mail per mailbox there is and what’s received per day etc to try and understand the load that could be placed on this system. As far the information I have received looks high.

How have people setup their current Exchange systems, I’ll be very interested to hear.

Thanks for any information, it will be of great help!
Rob

We have Exchange 2007 on one physical box, dual quad core with 12GB RAM. It runs all the roles (not ideal I know!) and has about 1200 Mailboxes. Since upping the RAM from 4GB to 12GB it's been fine. With the exception of 3 of us all users access it via OWA, I think we have two staff who also use iPhones.

Hope that's of some help!!

No thats brill! How many clients do you have concurently accessing the server, also do you know your mail hit per day?

Thanks!

I have my exchange on one box.....14Gb of RAM, 2x Xeon e5420 @ 2.5Ghz :D

To be honest, I've never looked at the hits per day. If I get chance later I'll remote in and have a look (my teas nearly ready!!)
I'm taking a very rough guess at probably anywhere from 250-350 concurrent connections via OWA. All the teachers have it open, most support staff and whenever I look down ABTutor, nearly all pupils seem to have OWA open as well! Use is increasing, nearly all school communication is done via e-mail and more and more staff are using it with pupils for marking work and sending tasks.

We have 1200 pupils, around 110 staff (teachers and support), and 540 PCs/laptops/thin clients

We're running Exchange 2007 on one physical box also. Running on a Dell Server with 2 x Quad (E5420) Processors with just 8Gb of RAM. Installed last year. Have it running two seperate RAID drives; RAID 1 on 2 x 15K SAS Drives for the System and Logs with the Stores going to a RAID 5 array running 5 x 10K SAS.

Currently have about 1500 mailboxes on it, all users can use Outlook 2007 to access with no problems. Not really sure on the concurrent users, but potentially around 450.

There is a calculation that Microsoft have for the amount of RAM per mailbox in use, not sure what it is though.

Been impressed with it, I was concerned about Spam when we moved over to it from mDaemon as we had alot of Spam getting through; the built in filters of Exchange and the filtered feed from SWGfL seems to be doing a good job.

Pete

Many thanks for the replies; I was just concerned about the load after seeing our SharePoint server’s (default homepage) load explode! I’m now considering adding a second server to the farm setup so that might be a summer job. The Eclipse lib server VM also will needs rebuilding as it’s only x86 and its just been peppered since we purchased the SharePoint web parts. Of course I when was then thinking about e-mail web parts and started worrying about the same scenario. Though obviously the spec will be expediently higher!
The system Ill probably run on one host server and split the roles into several guest VMs, this will make it easier to migrate if needed and also add to if load does become an issue.