Looking to upgrade to Exchange 2007 - advice on a VM size required

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lchiu7

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Topic # 83139 11-May-2011 12:19

I am looking to upgrade an environment from Exchange 2003/Server 2003 to Exchange 2007/Sever 2008 (not R2).

Currently the environment runs in a VM under VM Ware.

I suspect the new VM might require more resources and I have had the Exchange Profile Analyzer tool run on the environment. How can I take this data and project what the new environment needs to be (especially RAM and CPU units?).

Any ideas appreciated.

Note that there are about 100 mailboxes with about 50 active ones. The server also supports OWA but has no other uses.

Thanks

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gehenna

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Reply # 467897 11-May-2011 12:22

First consideration is that Exchange 2007 requires a 64 bit machine, so allocating that resource will be necessary - I'd go with 2 CPU's minumum, as will an appropriate amount of RAM - 4GB minimum. Next check the size of your existing information store and then work out the rate of growth. 2007 allows you to increase the size of your info store way beyond that of 2003 so be aware of that.

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Reply # 467946 11-May-2011 15:08

why exch 2007 and not exch 2010?

exch 2007 is going to use a ton less disk IOPS than 2003, and 2010 drops that even further as well as adding useful new features and a much better OWA client.

also, you lose the benefits of single instance storage with newer exchange, so plan for a potential immediate requirement for additional disk space.

for specs, RAM is king. I'd say you want 8GB+. CPU, a single quad core (or virtual equiv) will probably suffice.

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lchiu7

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Reply # 468091 11-May-2011 22:15

Exchange 2007 because the organisation has SA up to 2007 but not for 2010. Plus I heard anecdotally that there might be issues with Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2010.

Microsoft's recommendations, such as they are say, for a single Core CPU you ought to be able to handle 1000 mailboxes. We have 50 so apart from Exchange overhead, I would have thought a single core CPU (or VM equivalent) with say 4-8GB RAM would be more than fine.

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jim.cox

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Reply # 468169 12-May-2011 09:26

lchiu7: Plus I heard anecdotally that there might be issues with Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2010.

Thankx to the Chch quake we are now using an Exchange 2010 server with a variety of Outlook clients.

Haven't noticed any issues yet, although we do keep it pretty simple and are using pretty much only the mail side of things.

lyonrouge

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Reply # 470641 18-May-2011 16:53

Regs: why exch 2007 and not exch 2010?

exch 2007 is going to use a ton less disk IOPS than 2003, and 2010 drops that even further as well as adding useful new features and a much better OWA client.

also, you lose the benefits of single instance storage with newer exchange, so plan for a potential immediate requirement for additional disk space.

for specs, RAM is king. I'd say you want 8GB+. CPU, a single quad core (or virtual equiv) will probably suffice.

insane

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Reply # 470862 18-May-2011 23:01

Given that you'll be running this as a VM it's not so important that you get it right the first time as you can always dial up the servers specs as required.

I've got an exchange server 2010 running in a shared environment with around 120 mailboxes (70 or so 'active'), and its really over provisioned with 4 vCPUs (Xeon X5650) and 8GB RAM. With 6GB RAM it struggled a bit at times.

Here is a quick look at it's CPU usage over the past month

exchange CPU usage

browned

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Reply # 471045 19-May-2011 12:19

We are running 2007 with 700 mailboxes (300-400 active during peak times), OWA, and Blackberry Enterprise Server with a range of outlook clients on 2 cores and 6GB ram due to VM hardware limitations. No quotas, some mailboxes are larger than 10GB.

Once in a blue moon people may ask if email is slow, but we normally find the queues are only 1-2 messages on the exchange server, and 20 to 30mins on the mail marshal smtp servers due to automated invoice mailouts.

We have only recently replaced all of our VM hardware and now have the free cores/ram to add to the server, but no one has bothered yet as there doesn't seem to be the need.

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Reply # 471371 19-May-2011 23:03

You can find some sizing calculators here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/07/05/3403332.aspx