Exchange 2003 solution H/W Req   

Guys I need immediate help 

i need to know minimum hardware requirement for an exchange server with 
10.000 accounts (30MB mailboxes) 
Initially am thinking is to have 2 cluster as backend connected to 1 
terabyte SAN and 1 front end servers as the following

Backend servers  
Intel® Xeon™ processor at 3.6 GHz
4 GB memory 

Front end servers 
Dual Intel® Xeon™ processor at 2.8 GHz
2 GB memory 

Is the above H/W SP are ok? 

Also I have another requirement I’ll post it in minutes 

A million thanx in advance 
Regards,
Mazen

date: Tue, 9 May 2006 03:26:02 -0700   author:   Mazen

Re: Exchange 2003 solution H/W Req   

Hopefully the next message you post has a lot more information. There isn't 
even close to enough information there to hazard a guess.
If you haven't already, there're sizing documents available at 
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/library
It'll cover everything from user profiling to network to disk etc.

Al

"Mazen"  wrote in message 
news:8A160E6A-051D-4A25-9AF2-C25D67740892@microsoft.com...
> Guys I need immediate help
>
> i need to know minimum hardware requirement for an exchange server with
> 10.000 accounts (30MB mailboxes)
> Initially am thinking is to have 2 cluster as backend connected to 1
> terabyte SAN and 1 front end servers as the following
>
> Backend servers
> Intel XeonT processor at 3.6 GHz
> 4 GB memory
>
> Front end servers
> Dual Intel XeonT processor at 2.8 GHz
> 2 GB memory
>
> Is the above H/W SP are ok?
>
> Also I have another requirement I'll post it in minutes
>
> A million thanx in advance
> Regards,
> Mazen
>
>

date: Tue, 9 May 2006 22:15:19 -0400   author:   Al Mulnick

Re: Exchange 2003 solution H/W Req   

I won’t post message here if I have time to go through all that doucments 
My quatation was very simple… how many servers needed for 10.000 mailboxes 
on exchange backend front end deployment anyway Microsoft guys reply us as 
the  following  A/A/A/A/P/P – FE/FE ....Mazen

date: Wed, 10 May 2006 08:56:02 -0700   author:   Mazen

Re: Exchange 2003 solution H/W Req   

That's a strange response.  From MSKB 815180 we know that the max active 
users per EVS in an active/active design is 1900.  We also know that this 
represents 40% of the max capacity of a node.  We can infer that a single 
node is good to 3800 active users or so, still leaving 20% headroom. 
Given this, A/A/A/P should suffice.  Of course this assumes that all users 
are active at the same time.  If your concurrency rate is lower, you could 
go higher.  I've done 7500 users per EVS/active node in low concurrency 
environments.

On the front end, it depends on quite a few things as well, including usage 
pattern, hardware ssl offload, etc.  In most cases two FE or three FE 
servers with NLB will suffice.

Note:  Each node in an Exchange MSCS cluster requires a Windows 2003 
Enterprise and Exchange 2003 Enterprise license.  Front end servers require 
only Windows 2003 and Exchange Server 2003, not the enterprise versions.






"Mazen"  wrote in message 
news:D82E3A6F-91B0-477D-B957-E1297F7F9C40@microsoft.com...
>I won't post message here if I have time to go through all that doucments
> My quatation was very simple. how many servers needed for 10.000 mailboxes
> on exchange backend front end deployment anyway Microsoft guys reply us as
> the  following  A/A/A/A/P/P - FE/FE ....Mazen
>
>

date: Wed, 10 May 2006 12:46:52 -0700   author:   John Fullbright [MVP]

Re: Exchange 2003 solution H/W Req   

Understood.
Hope it works out well for you.  I noticed that John posted a response 
questioning the suggestion of a 6-way cluster (a/a/a/a/p/p).  From what 
you've said to date, you're not likely to pull that off.  My past experience 
tells me that folks unable/not willing to read the docs are not good 
candidates for clusters in the first place.  To successfully use Microsoft 
(or any vendor for that matter) clusters, you really need a high level of 
discipline to keep from melting down your environment.

One thing you'd find in that documentation I pointed out is why the 
recommendation to use 6 nodes (4 active and 2 passive). That's important to 
understanding what makes the cluster work. Understanding why you would even 
want to cluster in the first place is incredibly important.  Cluster is very 
expensive and even if money is no object, is highly complex and takes a 
great deal more time and discipline to make work. IMHO, you'd be better off 
using stand-alone BE servers.  Likely just max them out (HP makes some 
really nice DL 58x series machines; something comparable might be useful to 
you). Disk layout is incredibly important as you scale this up.  If you 
instead went with multiple smaller BE servers, say a farm of them, you could 
split the users down and therefore your risk of an outage due to hardware 
failure, significantly, however your maintenance would be more difficult as 
well.  The tradeoffs continue as you continue down the line figuring out 
what's important to you and what's not.

In the end your question was very simple.  The information needed to 
accurately answer, guide you is not present.  Your results and the answers 
you receive based on your simple question will vary.

Like I said, I wish you all the best and hope it works out well.

Al


"Mazen"  wrote in message 
news:D82E3A6F-91B0-477D-B957-E1297F7F9C40@microsoft.com...
>I won't post message here if I have time to go through all that doucments
> My quatation was very simple. how many servers needed for 10.000 mailboxes
> on exchange backend front end deployment anyway Microsoft guys reply us as
> the  following  A/A/A/A/P/P - FE/FE ....Mazen
>
>

date: Sat, 13 May 2006 17:31:02 -0400   author:   Al Mulnick