Exchange 2010. Or not?

[Zorba]

Evening All,

 

At my last school I implemented Exchange 2003 and it transformed the way we worked. I am now in a new post and am looking to deploy exchange there too. School is a large secondary and with students, staff and community will be looking at approx 1700 mailboxes.

 

Sorry but I have several questions:

 

1. Licensing. How have you licensed. I was looking at schools agreement and have been told I need connector license for students to access mail from home. How have you done it?

 

2. I am considering virtualising. What route have you gone and how much has this cost? What sort of hardware spec have you deployed?

 

3. Live@edu. Would take all the fun out of it, but would I be doing the school a dis-service by not implemnting this free solution? Would be interested in your thoughts.

[steve]

We've just upgraded to exchange 2010 and its quiet a different to 2003.

 

If I were you and starting from scratch with no existing mail system, I'd go with Live@edu.

 

No hardware to maintain / upgrade, no software to patch, no AV to manage, etc, etc.

[Abaddon]

.. also no backup strategy and no recourse when it goes pear-shaped.

 

I've split it out here, with on-premise Exchange 2010 for staff, and Live@Edu for students. Best of both worlds!

[Zorba]

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

If you have implemented Exchange 2010 I would be interested in your server specs and how you licensed. I would really like to host this ourselves as I think it is important to maintain our skillset and if we outsourced everything it really would be a dull job (see BSF)

[steve]

We run exchange 2010 with 2 servers - an edge server (smtp relay in/out) and the main server (all other roles) the edge server has 4Gb RAM , main server will be upped to 16Gb very soon (has 8 but is a bit slow).

 

Both servers are hyper-v virtual servers.

 

All licensed through schools agreement.

[Zorba]

We run exchange 2010 with 2 servers - an edge server (smtp relay in/out) and the main server (all other roles) the edge server has 4Gb RAM , main server will be upped to 16Gb very soon (has 8 but is a bit slow).

 

Both servers are hyper-v virtual servers.

 

All licensed through schools agreement.

 

Thanks Steve. Would you min sharing you server spec (complete) and number of mailboxes and cost. I am wondering if I am better of installing 2003/2007.

[zag]

I would go with Live@edu if it was a new implementation.

 

I saw a good quote on twitter the other day.

 

"In 2 years time running an exchange server in your organization is going to be like running your own nuclear reactor to power your home."

[gl3nnym]

We run exchange 2010 with 2 servers - an edge server (smtp relay in/out) and the main server (all other roles) the edge server has 4Gb RAM , main server will be upped to 16Gb very soon (has 8 but is a bit slow).

 

Both servers are hyper-v virtual servers.

 

All licensed through schools agreement.

 

8GB is a bit slow? How much traffic/users do you have? Maybe I am a bit behind the times and need to check out the capabilities of Exchange 2010.

[timzim]

We upgraded from 2003 to 2010 over the summer. Didn't buy specific hardware but upgraded a spare 3 yr old server: HP ProLiant DL140 G3, 2x quad xeon 2.33GHz, 8GB RAM (although I might double that this week as I've some spare), running on Server 2008R2. Run all server roles on the one server but only using for staff though so less than 100 users. Not straining at all and access is faster than 2003 server (which was 7 yrs old anyway).

We use OWA for external access - the 2010 SP1 version of OWA is a huge advance on 2003 OWA so i'd upgrade just for that. Don't need external connector licences for OWA.

[Zorba]

Thanks for all the replies. The more I read it seems that scaling 2010 to provide 1700 mailboxes is just not cost effective. Has anyone out there achieved what I want to do on a schools budget without breaking the bank?

[wesleyw]

£2,945 for 1700 user licensed Exchange 2010 Std?

 

 

Wes

[steve]

@gl3nnym 8Gb is MS minimum for a multi role server. We have 200+ staff using full outlook clients pretty much non stop all day. Most people haven't noticed the speed drop, but I have particularly when I have 3 or 4 mailboxes open.

[PiqueABoo]

"In 2 years time running an exchange server in your organization is going to be like running your own nuclear reactor to power your home."

 

Mmm.. I've long talked about Exchange being technological overkill, as in the kind of thing you get "to run mail for a small planet", but I ran considerably simpler, and trivial to recover ones before it existed (Netware Mercury being my very first => your e-mails were stored as files in the file system) and have never got over the relative scariness of Exchange.

 

@gl3nnym 8Gb is MS minimum for a multi role server.

 

I'm convinced that used to be the other way around for 2007 i.e. MS said you ought to be scaling out (adding boxes) if you got to the point where you seriously though more RAM would help. Regardless I think there's a bit of a consensus that 16GB is better... and all of this might be different for 2010.

 

if we outsourced everything it really would be a dull job

 

But managing accounts in a local GUI is much the same as managing accounts in a Live@Edu + you can get to play with ILM, break things with a subset of the powershell cmdlets, even point code at it (I did the add a few things to someone else's mailbox test the other week => worked) etc. I suppose it just depends on whether your definition of interesting extends to having to fix a seriously broken local Exchange, not that they do tend to break.

 

The inevitable problem with thinking about Exchange is predicting the various loads. You can waste a lot of your life not resolving much with the MS calculators, and by-and-by probably end up making it a bit of a Rolls-Royce solution just in case (which might turn out to be the right decision!). Do the latter for 1700 users and yup, there is a cost-effectivess problem.

 

I think it's really hard to ignore/dismiss Live@Edu and I'm struggling to do so for Staff accounts, never mind Students.

[mrbios]

Interesting this is the first i've seen of live@edu, what are the options for a school which already has exchange 2010 deployed with accounts for all staff and students in place, is it an easy thing to migrate to? We would only be after moving students and not teachers, it'd be nice to take a fair bit of the load off our exchange box, at the moment it's struggling and we can't afford to upgrade it.

[zag]

Live@edu is virtually the same as running exchange, the webmail interface is very similar and it works fine with outlook. Gmail do a good solution as well. They both have very well documented deployment guides.

 

The only problem I can see is students having to log on to webmail instead of the single sign on we have now with exchange. Everything else would be an improvement though I have no idea what students would do with 8gb storage! They currently do just fine with 50mb

[DrCheese]

The more I read it seems that scaling 2010 to provide 1700 mailboxes is just not cost effective.

Remember tho, that those accounts are pretty much inactive most of the day. I'd think that Microsoft's scaling guidelines are based more around corps were accounts are being hammered pretty much all day by static desktop users.

[mrbios]

Can you limit a lot of things like you can with exchange? eg: no student being able to email more than X amount of other students in one go, stop them sending emails to hotmail accounts and other external accounts from a list

[DrCheese]

yes, we do that here, otherwise students would spam entire yeargroups!

[CyberNerd]

The only problem I can see is students having to log on to webmail instead of the single sign on we have now with exchange. Everything else would be an improvement though I have no idea what students would do with 8gb storage! They currently do just fine with 50mb

 

There are a bunch of different single sign on methods for google apps, remember it isn't just an email solution - (with google apps) they use the storage space for eportfolios, hosting their own sites and other work.

[zag]

Yeh looks like live@edu does as well.

 

Not sure how easy it is to implement though

 

Live@edu

 

All this stuff is definitely the future though.

[Abaddon]

There is a single sign-on option for Live@Edu, which also provides 25Gb online storage and other Live services for online collaboration, including live editing of Office docs.. not seen the Google one though, so can't compare really.

[pran]

We still use Exchange 2003 for 100+ teachers & staff. The number mailboxes would probably increase to 150+ in the next 3 years. Is it better to just keep Exchange 2003 or move to 2010? From what I gather, it takes a lot of time, patience, and talent to manage an Exchange 2010 server but I wanted things to be simpler and easier.

• Replace Exchange 2003 with Zimbra or a similar product
  
• Stay with Exchange 2003
  
• Migrate to Exchange 2010
  

What's your opinion?

[vikpaw]

If it's available in your area it's worth considering a move to the free Live@edu offering as you can run it in parallel and it uses 2010. Then change in your time.

[pran]

Can we still use the full features of Outlook 2010 with Live@Edu? It would be great if Outlook 2010 wouldn't be dumbed down to just a front-end email client. The students are already using Google Apps and they're quite okay with it. It also is a pain to manage any Exchange server, I'd rather use an off-campus solution or something that is easy to maintain.

[vikpaw]

Can we still use the full features of Outlook 2010 with Live@Edu? It would be great if Outlook 2010 wouldn't be dumbed down to just a front-end email client. The students are already using Google Apps and they're quite okay with it. It also is a pain to manage any Exchange server, I'd rather use an off-campus solution or something that is easy to maintain.

 

As far as i know yes the webmail client is fully functional, including having office apps open in it like they do in hotmail. Also, you can you live@edu with a regular outlook client on the desktop and it works fine, really well in fact.

 

I've tried to use the collaboration features built in to live service and it was difficult and hard to get to grips with. I asked a teacher to try also and he found that google was still far easier for the primary students to use, so it is a bit limited, though i've not fully tested.

 

As the business offerings expand such as Office365 etc, the free side will also develop further so it's an area that will keep getting better. It's defo worth out sourcing exchange as it's one less hassle to deal with.