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d4nnyo

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SBS 2011 - migration to Exchange 2016

We're preparing to migrate our single SBS 2011 box to "full" Exchange 2016. We don't like the SBS limitations nor interface. The environment is 35 active users, 75 mailboxes, and 400 GB of active Exchange data.

I'm being advised to buy at least two boxes, one for DC and one for Exchange. A consultant is saying that 3 boxes would be better, 2 for DC. He's also talking about 4 boxes, which would include a shadow server that would pick up if the primary Exchange server failed. This all sounds a bit excessive. We can use the old server as a backup DC, so I'll probably buy two new boxes.

Some people say that virtualizing Exchange is the way to go, for rapid recovery. I'm inclined to stay with bare metal and a RAID 10 box for Exchange -- (8) 1TB enterprise hard drives should do it. Is there any reason not to go for SSD (aside from price, which may be out of our budget)?

Our environment is 100% Mac so we'll be upgrading to standalone Outlook 2016. No one likes Word, Excel, etc 2016 for Mac -- these programs are sluggish and less stable than 2011.

Finally, we want to stick with Dell because we know the platform inside out. However, we can't find any email notifier that works with Dell servers for hardware failure notification. Is there anything out there below the Enterprise level?

All suggestions welcome.
Avatar of Jon a.k.a Netgopher
Jon a.k.a Netgopher
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SBS 2011 is somewhat bloaty and redundant. We're slowly migrating our clients away as well.

It depends on your Growth expectancy and hardware available as to whether you install Exchange on a separate server or not. I've seen many Exchange installations hosted on the DC quite happily.

Virtualisation offers several benefits over bare metal configurations such as resource sharing of hardware and instant VM snapshotting. Additionally if you later "pool" Physical hosts you can migrate Virtual machines away from servers with failing hardware giving you short term respite whilst you deal with the fault (providing your live host has enough physical resources to cater for the additional VM).


As for Dell hardware monitoring look at the OpenManage Suite available off Dell's website with a little bit of tweaking you can configure email notifications (theres documentation online on how to do it but depends on your setup)

Kind Regards,
Jon
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Adam Brown
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d4nnyo

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Jon and Adam, thank you.

Adam, your comment reflects the cautious nature of our consultant, who advised me that virtualization is not really the best path for this environment. We are diligent about backup so we should be covered well enough. It seems you are in accord with "bare metal" here, correct?

As for SSD vs. HD, Dell is pushing SSD. I'm willing to consider 10K or 15K HD (if 15K is available). We're going to have a RAID 10 setup with four hard drives for a total of 4 TB. Even that is overkill but we'll never have to bother concerning ourselves with the mail store.  I know SSD is impossible to recover from. But isn't SSD more reliable than HD?

Regarding migration to hosting, some companies will never put their email into the cloud.
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