For Exchange 2007, I'd plan for 4GB of memory to start with and 2 virtual CPUs. That is a somewhat liberal estimate, you may be able to reduce those numbers if you monitor the server and the resources usage is low.
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Browse All TopicsI have hpyer v from 2008 server enterprise edition (4 virtual licenses). I wanted to see if it was a good idea to setup a Exchange server on a virtual machine or would it be better to intall it on a physical server instead.
Here is my Server Hardware with 2008 Server and Hyper V.
2 Quad Core 1.8 XEON Processors intel virualization
32MB of DDR ECC Ram
4 SCSI 140 gig Drives 10K RPM
If it is a good idea what setup should I use? Do I need more Hard disks? How much processor should I dedicate? how much ram?
i plan on using all 4 hosts.
1 Domain Controller
1 Exchange Server
1 Test Environment
1 Terminal Server or maybe e-commerce
The exchange server is for about 15-20 workstations. is this a bad plan?
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With such a small user base, having the logs and data on the same array (which is common for Small Business Server installations) is fine. I would say that RAID 5 is also fine, I've deployed thousands of Exchange mailboxes like this. I do agree with Leakim971 in the sense that RAID 10 is more performant, but it is less efficient in terms of space usage. Both options will work fine for you.
Should I get a seperate raid 1 for the e-commerce virtual machine or should will the raid 10 still be fine? remeber i will be having 4 VMs on this server.
0 windows 2008 enterprise and hyper v
1 primary domain Controller/Dns server
2 Exchange
3 Test environment (used rarely)
4 E-commerce or maybe terminal server 4-5 remote users accessing my sql server using remote desktop.
I would strongly recommend to add as many disks as you can afford and to have large capasity drives (+300 GB). The reason for this is Exchange.
Exchange is a special database application, that needs plenty of free space on the partition that the Exchange DB is located. For some type of backup and maintenance tools, Exchange requires at least the same space free as the size of your Exchange DB. Ie if you have a single DB with 50 GB, you will need at least 100 GB free, and then some extra GB free. And that is just for the partition where the DB is, you also need space for the OS itself and for DB logs, and the other servers you plan. RAID 5 will be sufficient for your small enviroment. Bigger disks and more disks in the same RAID5 array, increases perfomances.
Exchange will install and run fine with little free space on the partition where the DB is, but when somethings goes wrong, several tools need plenty of space to do their business. And when somethings goes wrong (it will certainly sooner or later, little or big impact), the least thing you want to do, is to upgrade the storage space - adding more time to the recovery process.
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by: Julian123Posted on 2009-11-03 at 20:52:33ID: 25736493
I've done many Exchange 2007 physical and virtual installations. Both work great, it depends on your resource usage. I'd say for Exchange 2007 and 15-20 users, the machine you have has power to spare (from the CPU, RAM, and disk perspective) assuming you aren't using any particularly high load applications. Given that, I'd go virtual with this topology. I would, of course, use RAID 10 or RAID 5 on your disks for storage performance.