Preparing servers for Exchange 2010

We are beginning work on our first few customers who have interested in Exchange 2010 and designing plans. One of the hardest parts of this right now is planning for storage. Microsoft has not yet released an Exchange 2010 Storage Calculator (updated)

A few guidelines thus far:

1. If you are planning for 3+ copies of your databases, you can spend less on fault tolerant RAID 5 or 10 for database storage. The 70% IOPS reduction from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, and ANOTHER reduction of 70% from Exchange 2007 to 2010, Microsoft is now able to offer JBOD support to support more fault tolerance by number of copies rather than RAID arrays. Think more geo-located data copies instead of protecting against X disk failures.
   
2. RAID1, obviously still makes a LOT of sense for Transaction Logs and OS/binaries.
   
3. Generally, sizing wise, I have been trying to limit planning to 200GB maximum databases and 2000 users per server.
   
4. We do have better processor and RAM guidelines from Microsoft on Exchange 2010 already… storage is coming still
   

As we get closer to 2010 RTM and get a storage calculator from Microsoft, I suspect that most of these guidelines will be inline, or at least adaptable to their guidelines. Having cheaper storage also allows for a fairly easy change rate. The ability to move mailboxes with the users still online also means that changing up your storage won't result in major outages.

• Install Windows 2008, regular or R2 (when released), 64 bit, Standard edition for standalone servers, Enterprise edition for Exchange 2010 Database Availability Group (DAG) support.
  
• Patch fully using Windows Update, WSUS, or other patch management tools
  
• Configure a static IP Address – unlike 2007, IPv6 does not need to be disabled
  
• Add the server to your Windows domain
  
• Install Exchange 2007 pre-requisites
  
  • All three required roles get these:
    
    • ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS (requires a reboot)
      
    • .NET 3.5
      
    • Windows Remote Management (WinRM) 2.0
      
    • Powershell 2.0
      
    • MMC update
      
    • ASP.NET AJAX extensions
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Server
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Metabase
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Basic-Auth
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Windows-Auth
      
  • Client Access role servers get these additionally:
    
    • ServerManagerCmd -i Web-ISAPI-Ext
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Digest-Auth
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Dyn-Compression
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i NET-HTTP-Activation
      
    • ServerManagerCmd -i RPC-over-HTTP-proxy
      
  • Mailbox role servers get these additionally:
    
    • Office 2007 Filter pack
      
    • If clustering is to be used: ServerManagerCmd -i Failover-Clustering
      
• Install Exchange 2010 Client Access and Hub Transport roles
  
• Install Exchange 2010 Mailbox roles
  

By the way – this is not required by any roles, but highly recommended for troubleshooting:

ServerManagerCmd -i Telnet-Client