Hi All,
I have been tasked with upgrading a client’s Exchange 2007 environment to Exchange 2010.
I would like some assistance with design considerations and first steps;
Current Setup.
2* MBX servers in a cluster
2* CAS/HT servers
All servers are physical and in a single site (Site A).
All mail flow (inbound and outbound) is through a spam filter.
They have three accepted domain (two of them are for separate companies for which they host there mail). The hosted mail users connect via HTTPS over RPC
They have one MX record point to the spam filter
They do have some sort of hardware load balancer currently. They will be upgrading to an F5 load balancer which I have to setup.
1800 users in total with about 600 GB of data
Office 2003 and 2007 users
Proposed Setup.
The data center is moving to two new sites. Sites B and C. The new 2010 servers will be built in Site A and then move to site’s B and C. Lets presume I have a fully redundant vSphere environment at each location using HA clusters.
I would like to go virtual if possible utilitising shared storage for the MBX servers.
I will be putting redundant roles in each site.
I would like information on how many servers I should have and sizing of each server.
I am thinking of a mbx server in each site setup as a two node DAG, and a CAS/HT server (two roles on one box)in each site.
Couple of questions;
- If I have it setup like this do I still use a CAS array or hardware load balancing?
- Should I separate cas and HT roles?
- Do I need more than one cas server at each site, if so it is still one cas array?
- Does a DAG consistent to two “active copies” of each database or is one considered passive until it is needed?
- Is there always only one address for webmail and http over RPC?
Are there other things I should be considering?
Thank you in advance.
