Coexistence Exchange 2010 and Active Directory in the same machine.

If possible i would say have Exchange and AD\DC on a separate servers

I dont think 850 Mailboxes will consume 3TB as you say and only 2 300GB ... where do you plan to have Logs and what is the number of Databases you plan to have ?

- Rancy

Hi Rancy,

Not is possible have separate servers.

3TB in RAID5 are 1,66TB
The others 2 disk of 300GB in RAID1 are 150GB system and 150 GB Transaction Logs of Exchange.

Do you really think Database would be so Large that you would need 1.66TB ? and logs on 150GB along with other stuff and as you know if backup issues for few days it can be an issue for you on this i assume

- rancy

Currently weighs the DB 600GB, if we think of a future sizing .....
In addition to the initial question, what size disks you advise?

Ohk so it 600GB and you can with Exchange 2010 STD version you can 5 Database of which one i assume with be PF database so we can have about 4 DB's to work with it

If its with 4 DB i would say from Exchange 2003 to 2010 we would even see some SIS break so DB size will be extended by a bit.

So i would say expect the SIS to raise the DB total size "600+100 GB" ...... so each Database could be about 175+ GB ...... so i would give a 300GB drives for 4 database (Total of minimum 1.2TB).

- Rancy

Thank you for your response to the disks. Finally'll set 3 disks 600GB or 750GB in RAID5
The main question about the infrastructure you think?

Thanks!

With your enterprise license, you're OK for installing a base OS just for the purpose of running Hyper-V, and then up to 4 VMs running the same license on the same hardware.  Personally, I'd run two VMs..  One being the DC, and the other being the Exchange server.  That way, you're satistflying the recommendation of separating Exchange from AD, and can boot them independantly.

As for your drives, since both machines would be virtual, you can start them off minimally, and increase the volumes later only as needed.  I'd let the core system have the 300g mirror, and then MAYBE build the DC on that 300g, but then build the Exchange 2010 on the Raid 5.  There's no reason on Exchange 2010 to separate logs and DB for performance.   You could argue that you should for data integrity reasons, but in your situation, since it's on a RAID 5 and virtualized, I dont think I'd bother, given the hardware you have available.  If you want to be careful, you could build a separate Virtual drive for logs, but it's going to be on the same RAID 5 anyway.  Your best data protection would come from building a second machine later anyway, and creating a DAG for redundancy.

You've got plenty of hardware to do what you want to do, and I dont think you'll have any trouble.  The one thing I'd caution about is that if you join the PHYSICAL machine to the domain, and that virtual DC is the only domain controller, you're going to have a catch-22 in that the DC isn't available when the physical machine boots (because the VM isn't started yet) so dont rely on any machine GPOs protecting/configuring the physical box, and dont forget to keep a local admin account/password on that box, just in case you ever have to log on and troubleshoot your virtual DC when it's not running.

So there is no conflict to be in the same disk RAID5 transaction logs and data from the database? Access read / write will be huge, right?
Two virtual machines ...... The DC will have a trust relationship with another domain and BES, no problem?
with anti-spam solution as Ironport? or other technological solution?

Could you give me an estimate of hardware for this virtual machine solution?

Thanks

Thank you for your post. Excellent.