Exchange 2007 - A hardware manufacturer’s wet dream

August 1 2006

There's been a lot of talk about Exchange 2007 from the perspective of the shipping version being available only as a 64-bit release.  Most of the Exchange world seems to think that the move to 64-bit is a good thing for server headroom, for example, from Jim McBee's weblog:

The 64-bit move for Exchange 2007 means "more RAM". That translates in to better performance, more efficient disk I/O (which is where larger servers have problems), and the ability to add more features that require improved I/O. Exchange 2003 is quite simply maxed out as far as what it can do; it is constrained by the amount of RAM it can access and therefore has to "go to disk" too often on a busier server.
OK, I guess that would make sense if I hadn't seen what Microsoft is recommending for RAM profiles for Exchange 2007.  I realize this is beta, but I assume it's close to the recommendation that will be made for release:
For Beta 2, 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM per server plus 7MB per user minimum, 2 gigabytes (GBs) of RAM per server plus 10MB per user recommended.

Note
The above minimum requirements and recommendations are based on our internal testing of Beta 2. These requirements and recommendations may change in the release to manufacturing version of Exchange 2007. The recommended memory configuration is suggested as a way to optimize performance for Exchange 2007. Specifically, it allows Exchange to use an appropriately sized database cache, which reduces database disk I/O. These recommendations are oriented towards authorized production environments that have many users with large, frequently used mailboxes.
OK so let me get this straight.  10 MB RAM per user on top of a base 2 GB.  So, a 500 user server needs 7 GB of real (not virtual) RAM .  And if Exchange 2007's 64-bit architecture is supposed to be all about RAM, can someone explain to me how this is supposed to work?  A Dell PowerEdge 6800 maxes out at 64 GB of RAM -- which would be enough for no more than 6200 users.  At a cost of, hmmmm, US$70,000+ -- just for an e-mail server!  Now that's price/performance.

So let's summarize.  To deploy Exchange 2007, you need -
  • 64-bit servers (which may mean a hardware replacement)
  • Running a 64-bit operating system (which means an OS-level upgrade)
  • With many GBs of RAM
  • Possible redundant server hardware for continuous replication
  • New Enterprise CALs (cost unknown) to use many of the new features
  • New version of Office, Outlook, SharePoint, and Office Communications Server to leverage all features

Seems to bring a whole new level of "rip and replace" to the Microsoft-minded.

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Microsoft  Add/View Comments [45]

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  1. 1  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 8/1/2006 11:44:11 AM

    Hey, they are almost matching Workplace requirements. Not in the number of servers though. ;-)

  1. 2  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 8/1/2006 12:30:36 PM

    Hmmm, witty responses could include:

    - At least Workplace Collaboration Services does a lot more than e-mail!

    - Must be why MS hasn't introduced that SQL Server back-end yet!

    - Sure the number of servers is the same -- Exchange 2007 needs separate global catalog servers and all sorts of other stuff!

    - Workplace? I'm a Notes guy!

    - Maybe I should go into hardware!

  1. 3  NeilT  | 8/1/2006 12:31:31 PM

    Perhaps Microsoft expect all their users to be concurrent all the time, however most people in this space are well aware that they aren't. If you use IBM concurrency figures, that comes up to 18,600 users. A useful number for $47,000 at circa 2.5$ per user.

    You won't see that on Domino today without going iSeries or zSeries. None of which are exactly "cheap" platforms in comparison to Dell servers.

    I have a feeling that 64bit servers are going to be a very good investment for customers running multiple Domino partitions where the Domino servers get a clean 3Gig of ram each. But of course if we are saying that having to go 64 bit to get the consolidated performance is a bad thing, how are we going to recommend the move to 64 bit later?

    Methinks you are running the risk of painting yourself into a corner with this one Ed.

    Personally I would be pushing the Value of 32/64 Domino, not crucifying Microsoft for demanding their customers use it. You would get about 30,000 Domino users on the same box running Windows x64 (other considerations such as disk etc taken into account). Which is a very powerful message. Especially at around $1.5 per user.

    Not very popular from an IBM hardware sales perspective though.....

    After all, it may be that not very far down the road we have to demand that customers use x64 too, to get similar price performance, and that would be a hard climb down which advance positioning today could avert.

    However it's your show.... :-)

  1. 4  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/1/2006 1:49:33 PM

    Where can I find this information for Domino? The Notes/Domino 7.01 Release Notes only lists the requirement of 512MB RAM per CPU. What are the per-user requirements or recommendations? I can't find it in the release notes or the Knowledgebase. I'd like to see an apples-to-apples breakdown using published information before I read too much into this.

    Even if that is forthcoming I think you're attacking this from the wrong angle. Exchange requires more servers than it should just to provide e-mail services, there is no doubt about that. But do any Domino customers routinely put more than 6,000 users on a single Domino partition? If so, do you know what kind of hardware configuration they have?

    Also, in previous posts you have made a big deal of the fact that more than half of Lotus' customers are SMB, which is defined as fewer than 1000 users. For these customers to migrate to Exchange would only require 12GB RAM. In my case, with 200 users, it would be 4GB, which is exactly what I have set aside for Domino. Is that overkill? I don't know, I can't find any published guidelines.

  1. 5  Roger Hintz  | 8/1/2006 1:55:18 PM

    @3 Just an FYI - Domino for System i (iSeries) is 64 bit and the Express Advantage options for the i520 are really very affordable for SMB (especially when you start adding DB2 and i5 security).

  1. 6  Sean  | 8/1/2006 2:00:20 PM

    Exchange 2007 could turn out to be a monster or a savior for the MS crowd. The mere promise of Exchange running well will justify the expense in the minds of most Exchange shops. Most will not consider Notes/Domino, even with the Outlook Plugin. It simply is not on the radar or in the DNA for most MS shops. Some marketing could change that especially with what Hannover promises, like being delivered on time for one.

  1. 7  Paul Robichaux http://www.robichaux.net/blog | 8/1/2006 2:26:59 PM

    Ed, you failed to highlight a key point in the requirements. { Link }

    @6: all I have to say is that the existing WCS management interface is guaranteed to piss off any experienced Windows administrator. Moving forward, IBM's going to have to improve it significantly if they want to effectively compete against the Exchange 2007/Office Server 2007 family.

  1. 8  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/1/2006 2:30:34 PM

    @5 - I just want to clarify that Domino on an iSeries is only feasible when you're mixing workloads. Bringing in a separate iSeries just for Domino can't be justified in any analysis I've seen. You either have to have thousands of users or mix workloads to make it financially justifiable.

  1. 9  Danny Lawrence  | 8/1/2006 3:06:32 PM

    @4 Charles, I haven't seen any published figs for ND RAM requirements, but I can give you a couple of real world examples:

    Very Small (7 users, relatively active, mail and a few apps): 1GB total (ND7)

    Medium (100+ serious mail users, half of a 200 user mail cluster) 4GB (ND6)

    And with my "medium" example remember that I can split the workload over 2 servers to get high avialability, with Exchanged you'll need an identical box sitting around waiting for the first one to fail.

  1. 10  David Bell  | 8/1/2006 5:20:49 PM

    Well - if you take Domino on Windows with a max of 2GB RAM and concurrent users of say 1,200 that's about 1.7mb per user.

    However, that includes Domino server processes that to compare equally would be called out here as the "base" RAM for the server. So if we conservatively say 700MB base, that then becomes ~1.1MB per user.

    I personally size at 1.3mb per user (which does include a component scaled on mail file size so this can fluctuate for extreme cases). Sure its not always totally accurate for each individual, but its a good working average that I use more often than not.

    Sun has always produced excellent sizing guides which is where I get a lot of my "per user" information. This appears not to have fluctuated too much over the last few years up to Domino 6.x with respect to memory, even across platforms. Total of 2GB per server on Windows, 2.3GB'ish on UNIX flavours and iSeries.

    Domino 7.0 on Solaris though is a different kettle of fish as I understand it because of some changes in both Solaris 10 and Domino 7 that allow much closer to 4GB of RAM to be used in the 32-bit address space.

    See here for details on sizing guides:

    { Link }

    You have to ask for them unfortunately.

  1. 11  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 8/1/2006 7:05:36 PM

    Here's a trackback for the Spanish speakers among us...

    "Más memoria que un elefante" (More memory than an elephant)

    Bueno, no me gustaría ser la persona de IT que tiene que presentar el presupuesto de migración... aunque supongo que nosotros venderemos muchos servidores nuevos.

    { Link }

  1. 12  Bob http://www.bobcongdon.com/blog | 8/1/2006 11:30:33 PM

    As Paul notes in his link from his comments in @7, there's a note in the requirements that Ed didn't quote:

    "These recommendations are oriented towards authorized production environments that have many users with large, frequently used mailboxes."

    Much less RAM is needed with smaller mailboxes and/or fewer concurrent users.

    Regarding WCS hardware requirements: the horror, the horror ;-)

  1. 13  Michael  | 8/2/2006 1:38:18 AM

    @12 : as you were member of the dev team, can we still blame you during the warranty period ? ;) (ps : kidding here, no offense)

  1. 14  Bob http://www.bobcongdon.com/blog | 8/2/2006 2:07:06 AM

    @13: WCS is layered on top of WPS which accounts for the lion's share of its hefty hardware demands. The stories I could tell... (but I can't and won't)

  1. 15  Michael  | 8/2/2006 2:38:00 AM

    @14 I spent the last 2 years on portal projects, I think I understand what you mean ;) (and I soooooo would like to hear your stories lol)

    Anyway, let's stick with Domino, this beast scales ;)

  1. 16  NeilT  | 8/2/2006 3:27:26 AM

    @5 and the disk cost is.......? The ability to run 70 Gig mailboxes may be nice but when the disk costs start to contain 6 0's it's really, really painful.

    Have you ever seen 3 Domino servers on a dedicated iSeries (300 users each) take an iSeries down to the point where the job scheduler stops scheduling jobs? I have.

    The real cost of performance iSeries comes down to an Enterprise spend. And that really is for enterprises.

    I spent a frustrating day with a newspaper in London 2 years back. They had overloaded their iSeries. The disk was 90%, the memory was 90% and the CPU was 90%. The daily compact was taking 26 hours and the weekly fixups were taking 8 days.

    I had to switch off FTI just to gain some control and recommend an emergency disk injection.

    In the end they decided to go to a Windows cluster because the cost of upgrading the iSeries was just too high.

    The number of users....? 800 on a dedicated iSeries!

    If you have 25 users and some spare headroom on an iSeries, why not? If you have 500 you need a dedicated box. It's like the guy who told me he had sold the solution of clustering over a 10Mbit WAN line..... It doesn't fit.

  1. 17  Roger Hintz  | 8/2/2006 4:49:17 AM

    @16 Very good point regarding disk costs. That is the most quoted downfall for Domino on iSeries I have heard.

    Most of our customers have less than 50 users so I would agree with you that there are sizing considerations when deploting iSeries... and it seems that it works well for small and enterprise but not so much for medium sized businesses.

    @8 I agree that you should be mixing workloads to make iSeries affordable. I'm not recommending iSeries for everyone, just pointing out that it is 64 bit, has some unique Domino features and can be cost effective under the Express Advantage pricing for small customers (an area that seems to get neglected too often). My company has a couple of accounts that upgraded to i520 Express boxes (single-way, < 2GB Memory) for less than $25K and are running beautifully. They are also running DB2 for iSeries and LEI or DECS, and hosting their own websites.

  1. 18  Wild Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 8/2/2006 6:45:23 AM

    @6. "Some Marketing..."

    Absolutely.

    Since the boxing gloves at the start of the year, I've seen Domino participate (though not in name) in the "Diary" ads..

    Whats next ?

    Can we get a series of Domino targeted ads - "Clustering", "Security", "Scalability", etc ?

    It'd be nice to explain to folks that I'm a Domino guy without:

    1. Explaining what it is.

    2. Explaining that no - its not dead yet...

    3. Explaining that Exchange/Outlook is not "better".

    ---* Bill

  1. 19  NeilT  | 8/2/2006 7:37:50 AM

    @18

    And perhaps we can get it into Schools, Colleges and Universities so that in 6 years time we will have young people saying "oh yes Notes!". Instead of "What's that thing!"

    Educational discount anyone?

    Especially with opendoc and the built in Office style functionality of Hanover. Although the hardware may be an issue.

  1. 20  David Leedy  | 8/2/2006 7:55:57 AM

    @19)

    An Educational discount would be great! I tried to get notes into a local Catholic school and the cost was just way too high and it's a tiny school...

  1. 21  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 8/2/2006 8:22:39 AM

    @12 It IS in my quote, above.

  1. 22  Danny Lawrence  | 8/2/2006 8:26:55 AM

    One more thing. With every major release of Domino we get more capacity from the server code. Why is it that MSFT can't do that?

  1. 23  Sean Murphy  | 8/2/2006 9:04:20 AM

    Sure, iSeries can be expensive. I currently have two LPARs with 8 processors each and 20 GB memory shared between the DPARs. We run thousands of concurrent users with a very heavy interactive workload on this HA Domino cluster of iNotes and a custom Intranet of over 300 custom applications developed over the last 8 years.

    How much does it really cost for the Exchange HA Cluster technology today with Windows 2003 Enterprise and Exchange 2003 to build the same environment?

    You would need a large Windows 2003 64bit server farm built on new AMD 64 bit servers coupled to expensive fiber channel SAN solution.

    A true HA cluster built with Exchange/Sharepoint with going to Fibre Channel Clusters, Dual redundant HBAs required per node etc. The Cluster technology for Microsoft Windows Enterprise 2003 and Exchange/Sharepoint 2003 is very expensive today and I would suspect Exchange 2007 will not be any different, except you now need to run it in 64 bit mode on AMD since Itanium is not supported, and any Intel Zeon chipset using the 533 MHz FSB systems is also not supported.

    SO, if I were a MS customer and I put in an Exchange 2003 HA Cluster last year using Intel Zeon 32bit, I now have to replace that with AMD to have true 64 bit in Exchange 2007 and there is no backwards compatibility with my older Exchange systems.

    iSeries may be expensive but this sounds really expensive and is definitely rip and replace.

  1. 24  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/2/2006 9:09:00 AM

    @10 - Thanks for that info. I never know what information applies cross-platform so I've largely ignored the Solaris documentation. I'll circle back and review it knowing that it is relevant. I really, really wish Lotus and IBM would get better about publishing this kind of information. I don't work with a Lotus BP so I'm totally dependent on the Lotus website for all my information.

    @16/17 - I had a Lotus BP size my current iSeries 270 Dedicated for Domino with 2 CPU's and 1GB RAM. As I've said before, I'm supporting 200 users, but I'm running 4 Domino partitions. I have been having major performance problems, which probably comes as no surprise to you but it took me nearly a year of digging to finally figure out why since I had no clue what I was looking at. Now I'm on RHEL, which I still don't know much about, but at least I can find the information I need and I have a better chance of finding people familiar with the platform who can help me.

    @12 - "Many users" and "large, frequently used mailboxes" are both subjective statements. There is nothing that says what those two statements are using as a baseline, so it is completely open to interpretation. Paul provides a definition, but it is not in the documentation provided by Microsoft. How could Ed possibly be expected to know that?

  1. 25  Bob http://www.bobcongdon.com/blog | 8/2/2006 9:19:17 AM

    @21: I should have said "Ed failed to note". Based on your comment on Paul's blog (i.e. "where does it say that") you hadn't taken that note into consideration.

  1. 26  Steven  | 8/2/2006 9:45:22 AM

    @24 regarding @12: When we did a recent cost study for Domino vs. Exchange, we used a number of MS tools for sizing the Exchange environment. Let me see if I can find them as I recall there were specific items teh help clarify the various "subjective" MS mail box sizes that involved messages per day, avg message size, yada, yada, yada that we actaully found most helpful. From the Domino side, we did not need such tools as we've had cc:Mail/Notes/Domino for soooo long we knew all the sizing stuff by heart. I guess this is a puls for MS vs IBM, but as you've found with soooo many different OS's supported, IBM has been lacking this same level of detail regarding sizing.

  1. 27  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 8/2/2006 10:41:10 AM

    Re marketing... what happened to Surjit anyway?

  1. 28  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 8/2/2006 10:48:23 AM

    @27 Surjit moved to a worldwide sales SMB marketing role within IBM. Marjorie Tenzer replaced him, a long-time Lotus veteran. Marjorie has continued Surjit's focus on reinvigorating the Lotus brand, putting energy behind Sametime and Notes, and getting ready for "Hannover".

  1. 29  Paul Gagnon  | 8/2/2006 10:52:53 AM

    This is always a great topic Ed.

    Just a couple of quick talking points:

    As we all know, IBM sells Intel based servers too. I'm sure that division will benifit from the Exchange 2007 hardware requirements as much as Dell or HP.

    <snip>"Possible redundant server hardware for continuous replication"</snip> - synchronization?.

    Only ND does real replication, let's not give that one up. ;)

    @19 - especially with Domino on Linux.

  1. 30  Paul Robichaux http://www.robichaux.net/blog | 8/2/2006 10:56:29 AM

    @24: as Steven notes in @26, Microsoft has a ton of hard sizing data available to customers; you're right that they're leaving themselves some wiggle room on what "large" and "frequently" mean in this context.

  1. 31  Ken Yee http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf | 8/2/2006 12:12:49 PM

    And I thought Lotus WorkPlace was bad :-P

    BTW, if you run 64-bit Linux, each Domino partition can use a full 4GB...

  1. 32  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 8/2/2006 12:43:06 PM

    For everyone who's asked for sizing data for Domino...

    Lotus Domino Version 6.0/6.5/7.0 Sizing Guides for IBM iSeries, System p5, pSeries and xSeries systems are available 24/7 worldwide for your use at: { Link }

  1. 33  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/2/2006 2:42:12 PM

    @32 - My point was that Ed is beating up Microsoft for their guidelines but IBM doesn't even publish any. While I think Microsoft's requirements for Exchange are exorbitant, at least they're making the information available.

    It's not a big deal to me, my main point was that Ed needs to make sure he has himself covered before he goes blasting away at Microsoft. If this information were available and easily accessible for Domino we wouldn't be having this conversation.

    The online sizer still does not answer the question of how much memory is recommended per user. The best I can figure it's somewhere between 3 and 5 MB, but that's mostly a sophisticated guess based on multiple configurations run through the sizer.

  1. 34  NeilT  | 8/2/2006 3:40:32 PM

    @32 I have a whole page of A4 of comments on "IBM Sizing" but I suspect here is neither the time or the place for that.

    @22 If you have slammed your Domino head into the 2/3 gig barrier on R6, you will not get any relief from R7.

    @31 You get a clean 3 Gig of space on Windows x64 for each Domino partition. Which is where I calculated the 30k (registered) users from at a realistic rate of approx 1.5k users per partition. Giving the OS 2 gig of memory to play with that is.

    @24 your have probably been here already but let me try to see if I have anything new.

    Wind back the Domino memory usage to close to painful when fully loaded (reduce the nsf_buffer_poolsize_mb), if you use http, try the same with the http settings (can't remember them). The iSeries may handle memory efficiently but Domino won't, it'll hog everything it sees.

    Make Absolutely certain you're not swapping memory. If you start swapping Domino will take forever to open a database.

    If you cluster, use multiple Domino network ports even if you only use one physical gig adapter.

    Look at options in the storage space. See if you can get a small SAN solution which will allow you to break up the disk from the linear system space to separate pools which can perform differently. Try to get the mailboxes out of the same space as the system files. If you manage that get the rebuild dir off the mailbox drives.

    If you are seeing very fluxuating availability figures (90 - 0 ) set the SERVER_TRANSFORM_RANGE variable to 25 and crank it up by 5 until it stabilises. That will give you a real idea of how it is actually performing.

    If you use archived translog with backup make Absolutely sure that the disk subsystem can cope when a full backup is being done. If the drive subsystem maxes out the agent will lock the extents, mark them as available and crash the server.

    The iSeries has issues with large files and indexing. Try to keep file sizes down with proactive compacting in low times. When in maintenance mode use updall -r -c to rebuild all indexes rather than using user driven index update during peak periods.

    If you haven't gained some performance and stability after this, you need a much bigger box ;-)

  1. 35  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/2/2006 4:17:03 PM

    @24 - I took notes on your recommendations, but the iSeries will soon be history so I don't care about extending its life. I'm in the process of moving all my Domino servers to the BladeCenter and RHEL and then I'll gleefully kick the iSeries to the curb.

    I do know my biggest problem was disk utilization. 10 spindles and they were all running at more than 50% busy all the time, even when there were no users on the system. I had IBM look at it, I had multiple business partners look at it, the consensus was I needed to upgrade RAM before it would get any better.

  1. 36  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 8/2/2006 4:51:08 PM

    Charles,

    I understand you are essentially saying that I had better check if I am in a glass house before throwing stones, but isn't it true that Domino does much more than Exchange, so it would be an apples to oranges comparison? :-)

    Point taken that we haven't done enough to make it easy to size Domino bozes. Notesbench used to be my #1 recommendation, but fewer of the hardware vendors are taking it upon themselves to publish benchmarks there lately.

  1. 37  Bill Brown  | 8/3/2006 7:16:57 AM

    @19 & 20: Education pricing does exist, but it is far less attractive than it used to be.

    In New York state, we have organizations across the state know as Boards of COoperative Education Services. Here at Erie 1 BOCES, we host a Regional Information Center that originally was formed to provide mainframe datacenter services when computer=mainframe was the rule. Now we offer much more, including email support using Notes/Domino.

    IBM had a program known as Total Campus Option, that was incredibly attractive price-wise. A few years ago, they just eliminated it. Our costs for N/D licenses went through the roof, but I will admit they are still a good deal compared to "list price." But no one pays list anyways.

    We lost about 5 school districts to other mail systems (most Exchange) and we fought hard to retain a few others.

    Please bring back TCO pricing for education.

  1. 38  Bill Brown  | 8/3/2006 7:25:27 AM

    @36 I always had trouble taking notesbench resuslts and applying them to a real server for 100 or 5000 users. Boxes with tens or hundreds of spindles? Not running HTTP (in some of the configs) so they can web to their mail? No schedule manager to keep busytime.nsf up to date?

    How do those help me size a domino box to do what people want and need to do?

  1. 39  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/3/2006 8:49:51 AM

    @36 - I wholeheartedly agree that Domino does more than Exchange and is necessarily a more complicated beast to size appropriately. As Bill says @38, it requires multiple levels of metrics that have to be woven together to get a fuzzy picture. A clear one is nearly impossible for mere mortals (read: non-IBM/Lotus employees).

    At least giving a broad recommendation would be a starting point. That's what Microsoft did and I'm sure the people planning their infrastructures appreciate the worst-case scenario guidelines.

    And I do appreciate your willingness to put yourself out there. You must have skin like a rhino by now. :)

  1. 40  Sean  | 8/3/2006 8:54:40 AM

    @34 "The iSeries has issues with large files and indexing."

    Neil, that simply is not true, I run clustered databases with over 600,000 docs around 32 GB in size that are full text indexed and update just fine when set to update hourly. We have several databases residing in our iSeries Domino cluster with more than six replicas in the cluster, large databases size with hundreds of thousands of documents in them.

    Try and index and cluster that on Windows.

    Charles' main issue is he does not have enough memory, 1 GB for the whole 270 system. The 1 GB of memory is constrained and he is probably seeing allot of page faulting in the BASE pool on the system. iSeries jobs can be fine tuned very easily, much more than any Windows system. Setting up private memory pools and tuning job run priorities, without even digging into the NIF settings in Notes and limiting the transactions that Domino can perform. With only 200 users he could tune it further if needed. Charles look at Chris Whisonant site, he is an expert like me and is his Blog is linked here. Kim Green is a consultant who also can help and presents at Common and LotusSphere. I know it may be too late since you mentioned replacing the box, but if anyone can help you it would be Kim or Chris.

  1. 41  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/3/2006 9:20:43 AM

    @40 - I don't want to bogart Ed's blog any more than I already have. The iSeries is being replaced so this is not an issue for me any more. I understand that on the iSeries I need more memory than the BP recommended, and I also understand I need more spindles to share the load. The cost of that upgrade was not justifiable, hence the move to a new platform.

  1. 42  Jim McBee http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com | 8/4/2006 5:41:19 PM

    I suspect that once E2K7 is optimized released, the RAM requirements won't be quite so hefty.

  1. 43  David F  | 8/7/2006 10:11:56 AM

    64 bit processors? so what? most of today clients have EMT 64bits hardware platforms (and even don't know that) so the only problem here is the inplace upgrade.

  1. 44  Devin L. Ganger http://blogs.3sharp.com/blog/deving/ | 8/8/2006 9:25:40 PM

    I also suspect that Microsoft is setting their recommendations with the assumption that users moving to Exchange 2007 are doing so because they want to take full advantage of the I/O reductions it offers -- and that means loading the box with as much RAM as makes sense financially.

  1. 45  Uli Zug  | 8/30/2006 5:22:06 AM

    I justed noticed that MS has lowered the recommended memory reqs for Exch 2007 substantially.

    Now on the Website { Link }

    You find the following statement:

    Memory

    For Beta 2, 2 gigabytes (GBs) of RAM per server minimum. 2 gigabytes (GBs) of RAM per server + 5 megabytes (MBs) of RAM per user recommended.

    A few weeks/days ago I was:

    For Beta 2, 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM per server plus 7MB per user minimum, 2 gigabytes (GBs) of RAM per server plus 10MB per user recommended.

    So, they're working on that. Hope we will see the MB per User recommendation drop even more.