EV Indexing Server Group

[KeirL]

Hi

I'm taking a closer look at creating an Indexing Server group for an new EV customer. They have about 30,000 mailboxes across 6 Exchange mailbox servers on a single site. I was thinking of doing a either a 1:1 relationship and have local index and storage service on each EV server and hence have 6 EV servers or to have a 1:2 relationship (EV:Exchange) but then to have a couple of Indexing servers to offload the indexing tasks and allow a single EV server to more easily cope with 10,000 mailboxes each. The user is fairly typical usage levels with message size (<100KB) and attachment rates (<30%) etc (heavy users on about 60 messages per day and light at about 15-20). They do want eDiscovery (but not expecting to need it much) and do some light journaling (only cetain mailboxes @ 100,000 messages a day).

Is there an obvious way to go here.....?

many thanks

[AndrewB · Accepted solution]

considering that you're primarily talking about mailbox archiving for this customer, i think it makes sense to split it up 1:1 Exchange:EV and spread the 30k mailboxes evenly across your 6 EV servers which would be 5k per server. that would align with best practices for mailbox archiving of about 5k mailboxes per EV server too. (this is much different than best practices for journal archiving)

have you looked into SMTP journal archiving with EV 11? it should easily handle the 100k items per day your customer requires.

while 30k mailboxes is a large environment, i dont think it's large enough to justify or require index server groups especially if they arent heavy on eDiscovery and since you're not doing much journaling at all.

[WiTSend]

I would most strongly recommend against Index Server Groups.  Having put them in my updated environment I rue that day and since I can't get rid of them once they're in it's been a big hassle ever since.  The Building Block design is still the best.  Also, I would even increase my vehemence against Index server groups with relation to Journal archiving.

[KeirL]

Thanks Andrew

So is 5k mailboxes still best practice for EV11? I thought 8k was now acceptable but not really seen any technotes either way. The latest EV sizing tool doesn't seem to factor that in and happy to suggest only 3 EV servers for the above environment based on the message size and attachment sizes etc.....

The other thing is that this will be a virtualised environment which I think makes it even easier to have extra mailboxes servers - so I think this will be the best way to go.... thanks for that.

I plan to have a dedicated journal archive server and dedicated DA server so there should be plenty of compute available there to cope in the absence of Index Server groups anyway.

thanks again

[AndrewB]

i wasnt aware of any changes to the best practice for number of mailboxes per server. in fact, with IMAP access there's no way you can do 8k per server. in your case, if the 30k mailboxes are evenly distributed across 6 Exch servers then it makes perfect sense to mimic that design with EV and it would provide some room for a bit of growth. i just dont see going with 10k mailboxes per EV server no matter what the sizing calculator says.

sounds like we're on the same page with everything else though. also, you could easily journal and DA from the same server if it's only 100k items per day.

[KeirL]

Thanks both

I think we have a our way forward :o)