New server spec for virtualising Email and File servers

brendy · 17 Mar 2016 at 15:24

As above, Im looking at retiring two 7 year old HP DL's (file (400gb data and email, circa 200gb edb) and am thinking of replacing with one reasonable specced server, I was looking at a DL385P (AMD Third-Generation Opteron 6344 / 2.6 GHz ( 3.2 GHz ) ( 12-core ) with 64 Gb ram.
I did look at SSDs but think they are a little out of my budget (circa 7k)once exchange 2013, cals and OS are sorted. Would this CPU and a Raid 5 array with 10k rpm drives be sufficient for these two VM's on MS HyperV?
Site has circa 40 onsite users and maybe 15-20 remote mail users.

Armageus · 17 Mar 2016 at 15:48

RAID5 shouldn't be used for exchange (or anything really) - RAID10 is what you should be looking at.

brendy · 17 Mar 2016 at 16:04

Armageus said:
RAID5 shouldn't be used for exchange (or anything really) - RAID10 is what you should be looking at.

Fair enough, so a striped mirror set-up it is. Any advice on the choice of processor etc?

nutcase · 17 Mar 2016 at 18:12

How many mailboxes? Exchange 2013 (and 16 which is the current) has a much lower IOPS requirement than older versions so 10k should be fine over 15k or SSD.

brendy · 17 Mar 2016 at 18:16

60 or so plus a few dist groups.

blueboy2001 · 17 Mar 2016 at 20:09

If the DL385 RAID controller supports it you can buy 1 or 2 SSD and a Smartcache license. This provides a decent IOPS boost for not a lot of money.

nutcase · 17 Mar 2016 at 20:31

brendy said:
60 or so plus a few dist groups.

7.2k would probably be fine for that

But 10k is better for the quality of the disks.

We run 250 or so mailboxes, about 30 distribution groups, fileserver, dhcp, dns, mailmarshall, webmarshall, and a few other bits on a DL380 G7 running raid 5 on 8 10k disks. Works fine, if not exactly best practice.

Caged · 17 Mar 2016 at 22:50

brendy said:
Site has circa 40 onsite users and maybe 15-20 remote mail users.

Office 365