Life with Exchange 2007
Exchange 2007 is the latest in email services from Microsoft. It's the best beta software I've used from Microsoft in a long time. My aim is to give information about home to build a large scale exchange installation. If you are looking for help with a small installation please use Exchange 2003.
Get-DistributionGroupMember -Identity MailboxMoves20080207 | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics -FolderScope Inbox | fl Identity,ItemsInFolder netdom /query fsmo get-mailbox username | add-mailboxpermission -accessrights fullaccess -user adminuser
Exchange 2003 can handle 100 heavy users or 2000 on a server. Exchange 2007 should scale to 5000 but it does not do any better than exchange 2003. Where Exchange 2003 needed only a simple cas server (front end) you only needed a good backend (mailbox) server. In Exchange 2007 you need three servers just to have a working servies. Cas for owa, imap and active sync, Hub for email delivery both internal and external, and a mailbox server to store the database. It is not a good idea to mix these services. Cas and hub can live together but I would not advise it. And you are really brave you need an edge server for Internal delivery and anti-spam services. Wow could Microsoft ask for any more memory. Who thinks up this crap. Sounds like the programers that I dealt with at one job where they had this really scaleable software that needed so much hardware that it didn't matter how scaleable it was becasuse it was unmanageable. Microsoft needs to wake up. Exchange 2007 looks a lot like Exchange 5.0 and it was a real piece of crap. Exchange 2007 can be made to work but should we really have to pay so much more for less. Exchange 2003 enterprise edition SP2 can handle just as many users and just as big a db size.
You can get Exchange 2007 to work and it does have some nice features but it offers no extra features currently. Since Microsoft is dropping support on Exchange 2003 it doesn't really matter and you need to more to Exchange 2007 by the end of the year.
I would upgrade your current system to Exchange 2003 and than upgrade to Exchange 2007. A native 2007 install is not a good idea until SP2 comes out. If you don't like or use public folders you may be ok with doing a new install of Exchange 2007 but I would not advise it. If you have linux clients or other apps they may need Exchange 2003 accounts as Exchange 2007 is not very compatible with anything but Outlook 2007.
For servers a mid level data center grade rack server like a DL360 or DL380 is all you need. Two socket servers are fast enough and the memory subsystem is still faster then the four socket servers until some time next year. This has been true for a long time and will be true for many years to come. If you want to buy more spend it on memory not more cpu. Memory and disk is where the speed is.
The install is pretty easy but it can be confusing if you don't know the terminology. Edge is the Internet smtp service. Cas is the client access service with imap, pop, owa (web access), and active sync (outlook anywhere) (smart phone access). Hub is the smtp service and internal queue for mailbox to mailbox and server to server communication. Mailbox services is the database service (mailbox storage). Mixing these services is a bad idea. If you add hub to a mailbox service it will never balance the mail sending functions and overload on big email lists or heavy email loads. All the services are bad about sharing memory and it is like every service is MS-SQL. Big and needs a lot of memory and it does not know how to share. The installer on the enterprise version also has support for forefront which is the anti-spam, anti-virus software. I would also say that you should only run enterprise version as the other version have missing features and it is just easier to have all the features. You have to be carefull with the installer as it also includes the Exchange 2003 version 9 installer. Do not install version 9 on Exchange 2007 and it will let you which will cause problems. Exchange 2007 needs version 10 of forefront. The Anti-virus is antigen for those who remember and it is available without much work. The anti-spam piece is separate and it is turned on the edge server and does not work well on the hub transport. Forget about the anti-spam piece and use spamassassin on a Linux server which works better anyway.
The gui is getting better in SP1 but you have to learn how to use the powershell. Most functions have to be enabled and many of these are only done through the shell or it is much easier to enable it in the shell. You can also use powergui that adds many functions that Microsoft left off. SP1 is needed if you want all the gui functions.
You have to use the Exchange tools to make email accounts. The account manager in windows 2003 is now useless for email users. Sounds like Exchange 5.x doesn't it. The good thing is that the powershell and some command scripts make this much easier.
Once the servers are installed there are a lot of services that need to be enabled and many shell settings that need to be done.
Setup quotas to stop sending when the mailbox gets to be. Don't stop delivery as this bounces mail and makes users made. Also setup server rules for spam using headers or subject lines and set it up to delete the spam and the trash on a monthly basis. Keep email count in any one folder to under 1000 just like you would on a file system. Cached mode is a good idea in Outlook 2007 as it allows you to make changes without the user feeling much of anything. Move accounts around servers allows you to do upgrades and hardware changes without out much downtime. Need to upgrade a server take a few nights and schedule the mailboxes to be moved to other servers. Do your upgrades in the afternoon or at night as the server still needs to be up to redirect users to the new server. Once the upgrades are done. Move the users back and move on to the next server. So it is best to have enough servers to handle removing one server without over taxing the other servers. So if you have 2000 users you need three servers so you can have 1000 users per server with one server in service.
You should keep disk partitions simple. One partition per disk set. Most servers should have two disks. One for the system and one for the database and logs. The logs and database should be on the same disk as this will keep you from running out of one or the other and having a stopped email service. With Exchange 2007 there is no performance advantage to having the logs on another disk system. Using Raid 10 on all disks is the best. Never just have two disks and never ever use Raid 5. If you buy Dell and they tell you that Raid 5 is faster buy someone else's server as Raid 5 always has to do an extra read to make sure the parity information is correct. Disk is cheap and we don't need to worry about Raid 5. Raid 5 also has a slow rebuild time and there is nothing worse then watching a rebuild bottom out when your exchange server runs out of memory while waiting on disk. Raid 10 can rebuild and still give enough speed to keep up. Rebuild offline if you can though as it is much faster. I have seen some disk systems take 24 hours to rebuild in live mode and two hours in offline. If you can handle the downtime take the rebuild offline. Remember don't risk the data. Many users would take two hours downtime instead of losing all their email.
bakey@goodgoat.com - copywrite 2007-2008