I am building an Exchange 2010 environment and am trying to determine the amount of storage that will be required for the 2 Mailbox servers. Here are the specs:
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2000 user mailboxes (per mailbox)
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2gb storage per mailbox
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2 physical mailbox servers in DAG
There will be copies of the other server databases on the mailboxes for failover, so even if say each mailbox has a "healthy" copy of the other mailbox's db that still comes to 8+ terabytes with my math (2000 x 2gb = 4000gb …+4000bg copy from other server) Now of course the OS, Exchange, Log files..etc will take up space, but Microsoft's calculator after plugging into came up with this:
16+ terabytes seems a bit high! Please correct me if I am wrong. How much storage is actually necessary per 2000 user server?
Best Answer
That also looks about right to me. Do keep in mind that you won't be using all of that at once, so plan for expansion. You can start smaller, but so long as you can add space when you need it you can grow into that size.
Another thing Microsoft recommends is to keep your individual database sizes down. Should any one of them blow up, a 1.9TB DB is going to take days to run ESEUTIL on should that be required, and that'll be days without email for those users. We recently split our own 4400ish user environment from 2 Mailbox servers and 7 databases to 4 Mailbox servers and 16 databases, in large part because of this.