New to Microsoft Exchange (what's the best set-up?)

[iSteve]

Hello,

 

We may be about to move our school from our current email set up, to Microsoft Exchange & Outlook for aprox 1300 users. We have not run Exchange before, and I was hoping that someone may be able to give me some advice as to how it 'works'. For example, do you need one server to run Exchange, one to run OWA (for webmail), or one for the Exchange database, and one for the mailstore etc? Would we need to distribute the system over a couple of hosts for 1300 mailboxes?

 

If anyone can give me a pointer or two, it would be much appreciated!

[sted]

these days is there any point in setting up an internal exchange system from scratch when office 365 for education is free so you can leave ms to worry about the hardware setup etc?

[iSteve]

We are currently using free cloud email for our students, however I have been asked to investigate Exchange, on site. I appreciate it may not be the best option, but I need to get a feel for how it's set up before I try and rule it out.

[3s-gtech]

We have Exchange 2013, which we set up fresh two years ago. It may not be the optimum setup, but it works well for 1250 or so users.

 

We have it installed on bare metal, as we weren't sure what the demands would be like on the hardware. In hindsight, it should be fine on a powerful VM with well set up storage:

 

Physical server - HP DL585 - 4 x Opteron quad core 2.4GHz - 32GB RAM (more than adequate)

All storage is direct attached - 4 x 15k SCSI - 4 x 7.2k SATA - 2 RAID 1 arrays on the 15k disks (OS and Logs) and 1 RAID 10 array on 7.2k disks (Mailstore)

Windows Server 2012 (R2 would be preferable - you can't in-place upgrade on an Exchange server!)

iSCSI LUN for backup

 

Had to do a bit of cleanup on first install, as remnants of a much earlier Exchange setup dwelled in our AD. Once these were removed it was case of following through setup tutorials, trial and error, and a lot of work. Was worth it IMO, it's a great system. We didn't want to rely on external services, so we didn't choose O365 or GAFE.