Network connection for EV10

[Sortid]

Hi,

Might be a bit hard to answer, but...We are speccing hardware for new EV10 servers.  I am looking to go dual 6-core procs and 96GB RAM, basically because I can and I know that that will be more then adequate. 

My question is on the network side of things.  We are implementing Exchange 2010.  We currently have 10,000 users in Exchange 2003 on 6 clusters. These will be migrated to 2 active Exchange 2010 servers, 5000 users on each (we have spec'd DR servers, but these won't be active).  These are running on 10Gbe with 8GB FC to SAN storage.  The EV servers are in the same data centre and all run on 8Gb fibre to SAN storage.  I am tossing up whether to go on the EV server 4x1Gb NICs teamed to make 1x4Gb interface or to go dual 10Gbe interfaces for (dual for redundancy).  Our archiving window is between 5pm and 1am.  In that time I would hope to archive all 5000 users (alternate days between the 2 servers). 

Does this sound fair?  Is network as much of an issue in EV10?  Would 4Gb be enough?  What are people running out there?

Thanks,

[Wayne_Humphrey · Accepted solution]

Hi,

To be honest, your bottleneck I dounbt would be the network. Index IO & MSMQ would be your BN in your senarrio I guess, unless you considering ssd's for indexing :p 

What storage are you using for VS, indexing, temp, cache?

[Sortid]

We are using EMC Clariions CX4-960, flash cache, 15k fibre channel disks, raid 10.  I'm thinking that would be more a bottle neck then network, but want to be reasonable confident about it.

[Wayne_Humphrey]

i doubt it, no matter what u do, you need to rember this. ev needs 11 mapi calls to exchange, it then needs to generate an html rendition, then it needs to index it. it then needs to compress it and save it to disk, while also writing information to sql.... 

so see, look how much of an issue is your network, hardly 10% of the work travils via lan. ex - ev | ev - sql in your case...

[Sortid]

Thanks Wayne.  What do you mean by 11 mapi calls to Exchange?

[AndrewB]

sortid, there's a section in the performance guide about network usage. i think it would be valuable for you to look at.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH125795&key=50996