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Designing the storage for an Exchange 2003 cluster
I'm putting together an Exchange 2003 cluster and looking for other people's experience in doing similar to get optimum performance. The environment is only for 200 mailboxes, but the stores are currently over 600GB. Archiving will also be implemented to keep this from growing much further than this.
I've done a lot of reading on MS and other recommendations, but need some practical experience to help with a few decisions. I'll be using an HP MSA500G2 and originally planned a single 2x72GB disks (RAID1) array to be shared for logs, quorums, MSDTC and MTA/SMTP queues. The rest of the disks would be RAID1+0 and used for the Store databases. But looking at the recommendations I read more recently I think I may not have enough disks...
Which if any of the recommendations are key or most important given the environment?
1. Keep the SMTP/MTA queues on separate spindles from everything else (database, logs, Quorum?)
2. Start with 1 Store per Storage Group, as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890699
3. Have separate transaction log partitions for each Storage Group and have each on their own set of spindles.
Many thanks for any help.
I've done a lot of reading on MS and other recommendations, but need some practical experience to help with a few decisions. I'll be using an HP MSA500G2 and originally planned a single 2x72GB disks (RAID1) array to be shared for logs, quorums, MSDTC and MTA/SMTP queues. The rest of the disks would be RAID1+0 and used for the Store databases. But looking at the recommendations I read more recently I think I may not have enough disks...
Which if any of the recommendations are key or most important given the environment?
1. Keep the SMTP/MTA queues on separate spindles from everything else (database, logs, Quorum?)
2. Start with 1 Store per Storage Group, as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890699
3. Have separate transaction log partitions for each Storage Group and have each on their own set of spindles.
Many thanks for any help.
ASKER
Thanks for the comment. On your suggestions
1) one store for 600GB? I'm not sure I want that when it comes to a restore from backup. I would be looking at 8 or more stores to keep the size down to a reasonable level.
2) yes, as I mentioned in the original post.
3) not sure what you mean by 'only if required'.
1) one store for 600GB? I'm not sure I want that when it comes to a restore from backup. I would be looking at 8 or more stores to keep the size down to a reasonable level.
2) yes, as I mentioned in the original post.
3) not sure what you mean by 'only if required'.
what I mean by "Only if required " is to your question 2.
Well ofcourse for 600 gb you need multiple stores.
Well ofcourse for 600 gb you need multiple stores.
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1) One Store is enough to keep 200 mailboxes.
2) You should keep database on different partitions and log files on different partitions
3) You can have multiple stores in one storage group only if required