Greetings all,
Let me first start off by saying I work in an environment where I wear a variety of hats. Network Administration, System Administration, Infrastructure design and implementation, backups, Email admin(by no means am I an exchange admin, but have recovered from outages etc..). You name it I do it. With that said its tough to focus on one area, but at this point I need to. We currently host Exchange 2007, we have about 230 mailboxes with a 5G quota. Currently we are using about 284 GB of space with regards to our databases. I am in the process of getting together the sizing requirements for our 2013 Exchange build.
We currently run our exchange servers (1 mailbox server, 1 CAS + HUB) on VMware. We would like to have our new environment run on VMware as well. From my research and using the sizing calculator, I am getting a bit confused on best practices.
I am going to run in a multi-server role configuration for the new build.
Question 1: Should my logs be on the same volume as my OS? I prefer to separate this out. Exchange calculator has recommended the following: 2 volumes for DB's, 4 DB' per volume and 2 volume's for my logs. I would assume and additional volume for my OS? This is what I have come up with: 2TB for database volumes, 350 GB for logs, and 120 OS volume. This assumes growth for the next 5 years with 10% growth year over year.
Question 2: I don't have a separate site but would like to have some form of HA. When I fill out the calculator and another mailbox server and DAG it appears my volume requirement grows to nearly 7TB. I expected my size requirements to double for my secondary server and adding a file share witness. I expected more like a 5TB volume requirement between both servers. Also, it switches to a 2 volume requirement per server, putting a 1 DB+logs on each volume. This would make my databases huge.
What am I missing?
I feel my implementation being relatively small. A single mulit-server role configuration is tempting for simplicity, but I feel HA is to good to pass up.
Thanks for any advice or recommendations
Joe