Exchange 2010 On Premises or Cloud Decision
Hi
I hope some people out there have had a situation a bit like mine I’m in the middle of making my mind up as to whether or not i should have an on premises exchange 2010 or Zimbra or move my email to the cloud in some way.
So currently we have a HQ office with exchange 2003 and about 80 users this site has 3 ESX servers clustered and attached to shared storage and run some VM's which has just started really. The company has recently bought a few other companies and now we are looking to incorporate another 100 user Exchange 2003 into our upgrade plans now the 100 user company that the company bought is dispersed over about 5 different locations most of the users are in one site but about 40 are split between different branch offices. All offices are now connected via WAN.
Ultimately what i need to do is bring all the email services in under one roof and to do that i need to make my mind up on either running an exchange 2010 environment for 200 users in my VMware platform and all the connection speed issue i may have with the WAN or do i move out to the cloud?
Knowledge of Exchange 2010 is not great but i guess i could learn and train will have a company do initial install if i decide upon internal solution. Cost comparison is quite difficult here because i don’t need hardware if i go VM so i would need service to install and license which would prob be less than 20K however cloud exchange or zimbra could be 1000 per month forever...
Hard choice just wondering if anyone else had similar experience and what they found to be good decision or bad decision.
I know not single solution for every company but just trying to draw on general views and experience.
Thanks so very much.
I hope some people out there have had a situation a bit like mine I’m in the middle of making my mind up as to whether or not i should have an on premises exchange 2010 or Zimbra or move my email to the cloud in some way.
So currently we have a HQ office with exchange 2003 and about 80 users this site has 3 ESX servers clustered and attached to shared storage and run some VM's which has just started really. The company has recently bought a few other companies and now we are looking to incorporate another 100 user Exchange 2003 into our upgrade plans now the 100 user company that the company bought is dispersed over about 5 different locations most of the users are in one site but about 40 are split between different branch offices. All offices are now connected via WAN.
Ultimately what i need to do is bring all the email services in under one roof and to do that i need to make my mind up on either running an exchange 2010 environment for 200 users in my VMware platform and all the connection speed issue i may have with the WAN or do i move out to the cloud?
Knowledge of Exchange 2010 is not great but i guess i could learn and train will have a company do initial install if i decide upon internal solution. Cost comparison is quite difficult here because i don’t need hardware if i go VM so i would need service to install and license which would prob be less than 20K however cloud exchange or zimbra could be 1000 per month forever...
Hard choice just wondering if anyone else had similar experience and what they found to be good decision or bad decision.
I know not single solution for every company but just trying to draw on general views and experience.
Thanks so very much.
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If you do virtualize you mail servers you probably want to store the databases on dedicated datastores for better disk i/o performance. You could also more easily cluster the mail server this way. Just make sure you know your load. Database servers and mail servers (and mail servers are mostly DB now) are usually some of the least likely candidates for virtualization, and they will also tend to grab all available memory up front, so dynamic allocation may be a little more tricky.
with the risen of cloud computing, more and more users have put their data into the cloud, sensitive or not.
the most important is what legal position do you post if your data is not in your own country.
Those is the challenge it face at the moment.