Best Drive Layout (Exchange Server)

S

ShockValue

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 27, 2001
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Ok, looking to set up a new server at work. This is what I have

Perc5/i controller
4x Seagate 7200RPM 1TB Drives
2x WD3000HLFS (WD 10K RPM) 300GB

The server has 6 drive slots, so I'm limited there.

My exchange book suggests having a seperate drive (preferably on their own channels) for the OS, Logs, and Datastore.

My thought is setting up like this:

OS: RAID1, 2x Seagate drives
Logs: RAID1, 2x WD Raptors
Datastore: RAID1, 2x Seagate drives

Or, would I be better off just throwing the Seagates in a RAID10 arrangement?

Thoughts?

Edit: Size isn't really a limiting factor. Our current exchange logs are about 50GB and the datastores are about the same. Upgrading to 2010 shouldn't (in theory) increase the storage size neccesary by that much. But room for growth is something to watch as well.
 
Maybe raid 10 with two partitions, one for OS, one for logs. and raid 1 the two raptors for your datastore. If you outgrow it, you could always create a new datastore/partition on your raid 10 array....
 
AFAIK the logs are more read/write speed critical than the datastore. But I'm not 100% on that.
 
What is the current setup? Any performance issues with the current implementation?
 
The current server is going to be replaced. But it's a RAID1 OS+LOGS and RAID5 Datastore.

It's working fine, but starting to become a little sluggy.
 
Exchange 2010 has very low disk i/o requirements - IIRC, 10% of Exchange 2003. Given your situation, I would use the 4 Seagates in RAID 10 and the WD's for the OS and Logs in RAID 1. Although for 50gb of data, it really isn't going to matter much.

We run 400 Exchange 2010 users off of Hyper-V VMs that live on RAID 6 storage, for example. No complaints.

Your logs should be rolled in to the database when you back up. You do back up, right? :)
 
lizardking009 said:
We run 400 Exchange 2010 users off of Hyper-V VMs that live on RAID 6 storage, for example. No complaints.
Click to expand...

On that tangent, how much RAM do you give the Exchange VM? I'm considering setting one up for a dozen or so users. Not a ton of mail each day but a lot of messages in archive.
 
wkearney99 said:
On that tangent, how much RAM do you give the Exchange VM? I'm considering setting one up for a dozen or so users. Not a ton of mail each day but a lot of messages in archive.
Click to expand...

I give 8gb for each DAG node and still have 2.5gb free. I have half a dozen users on my home Exchange 2010 and I give 4gb per VM.
 
Hello All. I am hoping for a little guidance here. We are building a new server that will be used as a Hyper-V server eventually holding 4 VM's. At the present time, we have the following hardware:

IBM Express x3650 M3, 2x Xeon 6C X5675 95W 3.06GHz/1333MHz/12MB; 40GB RAM

Initially, we are planning on installing Windows Server 2008 R2 as the host OS and adding 1 VM that will be running Exchange 2010 on Server 2008 R2 Standard.
Shortly after that, we plan to add 2 new VM's. One will run Lotus Domino, the other will be a backup domain controller and server update services server.
Then, down the road, we are looking at adding the last VM which will run Sharepoint and SQL.

What we have right now for storage is 10- 600GB 2.5in SFF Slim-HS 10K 6Gbps SAS drives. This server is expandable to 16 drives total, but we are starting with 10.

My question is...

What physical drive configuration would be the best solution to support the scenario listed above? We would be implementing Exchange first, then migratiing the 2nd and 3rd servers to VM's. Sharepoint would be added in later.

Right now, we have 5 drives configured as RAID 10 with 1 hotspare setup for the Host OS and the 2nd and 3rd VM's. We also have the other 5 drives set up as RAID 10 with 1 hotspare dedicated to the Exchange VM.

We plan on having no more than 60 user mailboxes in Exchange.

Your thoughts and ideas are greatly appreciated.
 
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