1 exchange 2007 or 2 exchange 2007 servers in a company

fommy

hey all,

what is best for a company with 300 mailboxes across 5 sites?
Not a very large mailbox store around 100 GB

I am looking at setting one up for a company which is cost effective, I might ditch the edge server - any thoughts?

Thanks,

Matt.

RTmarc

I like 2 for redundancy. It seems like every company I've encountered over the past couple of years goes into panic mode if email is unavailable. The company I work for follows suit and is why we have four 2007 servers; two in a Mailbox cluster and two in a Client Access / Hub Transport cluster (all tied into a SAN).

hypnotoad

We have 1700 mailboxes on 1 site with 1 server, and about 100 gig mail store. PowerEdge 2950 w/ 12 gigs RAM and SAS drives keeps up pretty well. No redundancy though. I try to keep a close eye on backups.

paintb4707

Pardon my ignorance but... if an exchange server was unavailable in an environment with multiple exchange servers, would their mailbox be automatically directed to another server? I was never aware of any redundancy within exchange organizations, only that they would redirect you to the correct server where your mailbox is stored if you were to enter the wrong name.

RTmarc

In our case, the mailboxes are actually stored on the SAN so neither server actually holds the mailboxes. The SAN targets are connected via iSCSI and the servers have been configured to grab them based on availability; Server 1 cannot grab them while Server 2 is up and running. We can bounce our mailbox servers and connection is dropped for less than 30 seconds while the other server seizes the targets and reinitializes everything.

For our Client Access / Hub Transport they are simple load balancing servers so as long as one or the other is up, connection is available.

To date, it has worked perfectly.

blargoe

fommy wrote:

hey all,

what is best for a company with 300 mailboxes across 5 sites?
Not a very large mailbox store around 100 GB

I am looking at setting one up for a company which is cost effective, I might ditch the edge server - any thoughts?

Thanks,

Matt.

Depends on your company's requirements and SLA's for email uptime. If your business would shut down if email were down for 2 hours, you would need to look into a high availability solution for your mailbox server (2 servers required, plus shared storage) at a minimum, and possibly load balancing for a set of servers hosting hub transport/client access.

For security reasons I use a dedicated mailbox server with no other roles for my data and host the hub transport and client access on another server, even in smaller environments if I can help it. This way the Internet doesn't touch my mailbox data directly. The edge transport is really intended as an additional layer of security like a security appliance. A real hardware appliance does a better job of this and is cheaper. You could also install security software on your hub server. I wouldn't think an environment your size needs an edge server.