Sizing Question

[Ryan_the_Red]

I've got 10 sites to archive across minimum 45Mbps links to a central location. There are approximately 2500 mailboxes. This is the approach because we're centralizing Exchange and do not wish to temporarily implement between 1 and 2 servers per site on a temporary basis. There has historically been no management of mailbox size at all in the org. We know there are some mailboxes that have 10GB of mail individually.

Can a two server architecture, one Sql Server and one Archiving/Indexing server, handle archiving 2500 users archiving across these slower than LAN speed links temporarily?

Personally I would prefer a 3-server architecture, separating the archiving, indexing, and SQL Servers, bu this may not be in the budgetary cards.

[MirrorSphere · Accepted solution]

On the face of it then this seems ok but without any drilling down on figures and metrics in Exchange environment then you cannot be sure.  You should probably get some professional services to ascertain whether this is possible and provide you with some metrics.

It really depends on whether you have a large number of items either being sent or received from Exhange as to whether a single server is going to be enough.  For example EV has to get through its daily run of items to ensure that it is keeping up with itself.  (Important when Quota archiving, for obvous reasons)

EV obviously has a schedule in which to archive a number of items per day.  If the number of hours that it needs to archive is greater that the number of allowable hours in the day then it might warrant you to add a further server.  (Taking into account that you shouldnt be archiving when backing up Exchange, Exchange Maintenance, or actually backing up EV). 

There might be other types of archiving that you eventually go to as well, so this might need to be considered as well.  (Journaling)

You definitely want to keep indexing and storage service local to the EV server though for performance reasons.

With regards to the links they seem fine on the face of it again but it depends how saturated they are and more importantly what is the latency like between them.

Contact me off line if you want any further help.

[Alan_M]

You might want to rethink your use of a single, temporary swing server at those sites to archive the bulk of the information then physically bring the server back to the central site, move the data to the centralized EV server and then move onto the next site. This involves some editing of the SQL metadata but this process is very straightforward and will ease your worries about WAN traffic. You could then migrate the smaller mailboxes. Of course if you have never done this before then it might give you pause:-)

2500 users should be fine on a single EV server but as I mentioned earlier it is the WAN traffic that you need be concerned about. The actual speed of the WAN is not the problem it is the utilization. If you schedule archiving correctly then you can utilize the WAN when other traffic is minimal however this may also shorten your archiving window and in turn lengthen the amount of time it takes to archive mailboxes to the point where you can migrate them.

[Ryan_the_Red]

Thanks Alan and EV-ASSIST.

I couldn't get into the Partner forums last night so I posted here, lol, but yes I understand how to set everything up and I've sized several deployments in the past.

I just don't know why someone at Symantec would have said, in this situation, that only one server is necessary. I'm in the situation where I must work to sell the additional dedicated SQL Instance I'm recommending.

Anyway thanks for your help guys.