Quote Originally Posted by jamesfed View Post
I'd say both Exchange and your MIS (assuming its SIMS) are very database intensive applications with lots of I/O - as such you might want to make sure you get some decent speed (10-15k SAS drives) for that server.
Our file server is a virtual as well and sits accross 4x2Tb 7.2k SAS drives - it ticks along happily for a school of 300 machines, 100 staff and 900 students so I shouldn't imagine you will run into any problems (one thing that does help is the 1Gb of flash cache sitting behind it though).
SAS drives are a waste of money unless you have an especially large school with huge databases, going by your figures i'm willing to bet standard SATAII drives would cope fine with all of that.

We're currently running 16 VMs spread across 2 iSCSI links (individual links for each server, 2 links into the iscsi box) on a 4 x 2TB Standard SATAII drive RAID6 array and it can easily cope with more. (and soon it will have more, currently implementing vmotion)