Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator
A couple of weeks ago, the Microsoft Exchange Team announced the brand new Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator. Now all of we can start planning and designing Exchange Server 2010 mailbox servers.
“With Exchange 2010 you can deploy a solution that leverages mailbox resiliency and has multiple database copies deployed across datacenters, implements single item recovery for data recovery, and has the flexibility in storage design to allow you to deploy on storage area networks utilizing fibre-channel or SATA class disks or on direct attached storage utilizing SAS or SATA class disks with or without RAID protection. But, in order to design your solution, you need to understand the following criteria:
- User profile - the message profile, the mailbox size, and the number of users
- High availability architecture - the number of database copies you plant to deploy, whether the solution will be site resilient, the desired number of mailbox servers
- Server's CPU platform
- Storage architecture - the disk capacity / type and storage solution
- Backup architecture - whether to use hardware or software VSS and the frequency of the backups, or leverage the Exchange native data protection features
- Network architecture - the utilization, throughput, and latency aspects
Previous versions of Exchange were somewhat rigid in terms of the choices you had in designing your mailbox server role. The flexibility in the architecture with Exchange 2010, allows you the freedom to design the solution to meet your needs.”
The above mentioned post has all the details about the usage of the tool. The calculator tool itself can be downloaded from this link.