best practice question on exchange setup

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Ned Brickley - 26 Oct 2005 18:31 GMT

Greetings all, My company is moving through an AD rollout and in
their infinite wisdom have announced how they are going to
deploy new exchange 2003 servers.

It will be one server per site, (reasonable), however each
server will also be a file server, printer server and perhaps an
application server.

I remember from my 5.5 classess that this was a BIG no no.
However I need some ammunition to wave in front of the powers
that be. Is there a web page anywhere stating that Exchange 2003
should be on its own server? If so could someone post the URL? I
really want to nip this in the bud before things go up in
flames.

Thanks for any help anyone can give. :)

- --
Ned

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Ziggy Stardust - 31 Oct 2005 22:46 GMT

Hi Ned.

In my opinion, running exchange on a F&P server is still a no-no. Exchange
typically grabs all the physical memory it can for use with the Information
Store service. However, in really small sites (eg less than 20 users), a
single server can be all the budget allows for. I would suggest running some
of the sizing tools that MS provide against the proposed server while in
testing. See Exchange server Sizing and Tuning, under "Planning you exchange
infrastructure" here (may wrap):
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/guides/PlanE2k3MsgSys/0c96
8830-aaba-4938-9115-85d2a09736e4.mspx

Cheers, and good luck at convincing the "powers that be" that this is
probably a dumb idea!
Ziggy

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