Exchange 2010!

Burnsy2023 · 17 Apr 2009 at 15:06

cybergeek said:
OWA now supports Firefox/Safari

Does that mean full support rather than WebAccess Light?

ethos · 17 Apr 2009 at 16:24

Still on using / learning 2003 here!

Muffin` · 17 Apr 2009 at 18:03

no SQL yet

Vanilla · 17 Apr 2009 at 18:35

I wonder if they will keep the rather silly recommendation that all installs should go on DAS, and not SAN at all.

BoomAM · 17 Apr 2009 at 19:25

Like the sounds of these:

Shadow redundancy Messages that are submitted to an Exchange 2010 Hub Transport server are stored in the transport database until the next hop reports successful delivery of the message. If the next hop doesn't report successful delivery and it fails, the message is resubmitted for delivery.
......
New High Availability Functionality

Exchange 2010 integrates high availability into the core architecture of Microsoft Exchange to enable customers of all sizes and in all segments to economically deploy a messaging continuity service in their organization.

Exchange 2010 combines the key availability and resilience features of cluster continuous replication (CCR) and standby continuous replication (SCR) into a single high availability solution that handles both on-site data replication and off-site data replication. Mailbox servers can be defined as part of a Database Availability Group to provide automatic recovery at the individual mailbox database level instead of at the server level. Each mailbox database can have up to 16 copies.

The following features in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) no longer exist in Exchange 2010:
Local continuous replication (LCR)
Single copy clusters (SCC)
......
The ability to send and receive text (SMS) messages from Outlook Web Access

& i hope that MS & Symantec sort out their differences with BackupExec and using LCR. As well as the 'workaround' works, i'd prefer a cleaner way of doing it to be quite honest.

iaind · 17 Apr 2009 at 19:26

Vanilla said:
I wonder if they will keep the rather silly recommendation that all installs should go on DAS, and not SAN at all.

IS that a recommendation? Surely that doesnt make sense as Exchange has been cluster capable for many years now...

oddjob62 · 17 Apr 2009 at 19:30

Vanilla said:
I wonder if they will keep the rather silly recommendation that all installs should go on DAS, and not SAN at all.

Our new exchange environment is all DAS. Nothing silly about it. No real problem with using a SAN, and having CCR instead of SCC you don't have a storage as the single point of failure (yes i know there are ways round it, but having DAS is a lot more accessible to smaller companies who still want HA)

Vanilla · 18 Apr 2009 at 00:20

iaind said:
IS that a recommendation? Surely that doesnt make sense as Exchange has been cluster capable for many years now...

Yes, they say 2007 should be on DAS.

oddjob62 said:
Our new exchange environment is all DAS. Nothing silly about it. No real problem with using a SAN, and having CCR instead of SCC you don't have a storage as the single point of failure (yes i know there are ways round it, but having DAS is a lot more accessible to smaller companies who still want HA)

It will work for some people but looking at the bigger picture this blanket statement doesn’t make sense for a lot of people.

On a side note - decent storage arrays from the mid range upwards all have 99.999% availability and some of the high end ones from EMC and HDS are >99.999%. In comparison server vendors don’t even really go there. Storage arrays are HA out the wazoo so you’d need multiple failures to bring one down.

Now, the thing with the DAS is they recommend that ALL 2007 deployments regardless of size should be on DAS. It goes beyond SCR and CCR – it is perfectly possible to use SCR and CCR with the storage on a SAN. This has caused a lot of hoo-haa and many larger companies have forced MS into a position where they have forced a specific guarantee about 2007 on SAN out of MS for a number of reasons:

• Many companies use the storage array for replication of everything. Why be forced to have staff learn, train and use a new replication technology just for a single application?
• Then there is performance. I’ve found that the average Exchange 2007 deployment needs somewhere between 50-80 physical spindles per site (1000-2000 mailboxes). Getting this into a server is going to be tough – means more servers, more rackspace, more cost, more licenses, more support etc.
• It actually ends up costing more, utilisation is affected along with many other factors mentioned just above.

The only reason MS has done this is to try to bring down cost the of an Exchange solution. Rather than cut the price of their offering it just made sense for a software company to dictate the underlying hardware (and fail, I’ve not personally seen one deployment on DAS because MS do not have any technical reason why DAS is better – there are many reasons why it is not).

oddjob62 · 18 Apr 2009 at 06:43

Vanilla said:
It will work for some people but looking at the bigger picture this blanket statement doesn’t make sense for a lot of people.

Most blanket statements are like that. I chalked it down as a silly statement by MS to try to make their product more SMB (5-300 users) market friendly.
If you say 2000 mailboxes is an "average" install then you obviously work with bigger companies than I.
I have had a lot of dealings with over a hundred smaller businesses, and only 2-3 of them had any kind of SAN infrastructure, let alone what you would call a "mid-range" system. Being able to get full clustering with only a couple of servers with a realatively cheap DAS unit or internal storage is a BIG selling point for a lot of people. You say you've never seen a DAS deployment? Well pop by my office any time

Bottom line: i agree with you, there is no technical reason to use DAS over SAN, and MS should have simply used it as a selling point and not a recommendation.