First, I'd buy more servers. :-) Your eggs-to-basket ratio is way too high... Having said that, if I were constrained by your hardware, here's what I'd probably do...
I've managed a similar size environment for several years now at one of our clients. Big difference is that we have dedicated servers for roles. If I couldn't do that, I'd probably design it this way. I would set up a 2 drive mirror set for the OS and VMWare (drives 1 and 2). I would then virtualize a DC on a mirror set as well (drives 3 and 4). I would then put Exchange on the server physically, not virtual, with the logfiles on the first partition of a mirror (drives 5 and 6) and the DB on a 3-or-4-drive raid5 (drives 7-10). I would build a second DC on the second partition of the exchange mirror set (not virtual) (drives 5 and 6 again). Single DC=bad. With 75 users and appropriate mail management, your disk and exchange load probably isn't going to tax the server that hard. Recoverability is a MUCH larger factor. You're going to need some kind of viable backup strategy, too. Depending on the frequency of changes to the AD data, I'd drop the VM DC at least once a month and copy those files to a backup device somewhere. USB drive perhaps? Maybe a WD 1TB world book with mirroring if nothing else is available? (they suck, but they're a cheap mirrored NAS) You'll also need to backup Exchange somehow, and it needs to be backed up to somewhere other than that box. You need to have everything on redundant drives. I've spent way too much time cleaning up the mess caused by a failed HD in non-redundant configs that were built against my recommendations. It just sucks. Murphy's law says the drive will fail halfway into your backup, when the previous backup has been overwritten, and you won't have a current restorable backup. :-) (See viable backup strategy...LOL) And the drives WILL fail. Guaranteed. For the file sharing part, I'd probably put the share on a second partition on the raid 5 set. If allowable, I'd set up cached copies to the desktops. That will allow access to the files when something happens to the server. I'd monitor access to the file share to get an idea of how hard it's getting hit. If it's not being used that heavily, I'd consider moving it to one of the mirrors if it was impacting the exchange writes. It could go to the VMWare mirror; all depends on the loads you're seeing. You can also consider splitting up the file share with the most used stuff in one place and the "archive" stuff (we all have that) in another. DCs tend to get hit most during the morning logon rush. After that, it's relatively slow. You can also tune the DCs so that everyone logs into one of them preferentially, reducing the load on the other one if needed. Performance monitoring and tuning is your friend. Why VMWare? If the box takes a dive, you can throw VMWare on a desktop, copy the backed up VM files to that machine, and be up and running again in 10 minutes, at least for auth purposes. Exchange recoverability will take longer. BES; I'd probably virtualize. Maybe even on the OS mirror. It's a really low-stress app. Or on a desktop running VMWare. As others have mentioned, BES with Exch isn't ideal. Same box, different VM, much better. Also gets your BES running again fast. Crackberry addict (like me) panic when the BES is down. They start sweating profusely and gnawing on your ankles... Another way to do it would be to put just exchange and the file server stuff on the server and spin up DCs on desktop boxes. I would make SURE that management understands the E2B ratio here. You don't have enough hardware to do this well. It's workable, but a system board or memory failure could take down your entire company for possibly several days. That's why virtualization is so important in this scenario; you have to be able to recover to totally different hardware fast. A good company leader will see the need for and cost effectiveness of at least one more server. Good luck! ********************** Charlie Kaiser W2K3 MCSA/MCSE/Security Systems Engineer Essex Credit / Brickwalk 925 274 3183 ********************** -----Original Message----- From: Aaron T. Rohyans [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 6:34 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Domain Controller HD setup Thanks for the advice all! Let me add to the scenario as I left this part out .... I will be doing hardware RAID and I am willing to purchase additional drives as I have space for 5 more. So, spend my money if you need to :-) Aaron ________________________________ From: Bob Fronk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 9:33 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Domain Controller HD setup If this is all you have to work with then you need to decide if redundancy (Raid) is important or if performance and space is important. Mirroring the OS on the 73GBs is probably the best choice just for the sake of keeping the machine running if an HD fails. It is not much space and you will probably want to move your Exchange store to one of the other drives - but you will lose redundancy. So make sure you have a good backup plan. I think if I was forced to do what you need to do, I would mirror the 73GBs for the OS. Keep BES on the OS side if you can. Mirror two of the 146GBs for the Exchange Store, and use the last 146GB for file shares. But I would also have one heck of a backup plan. An alternative is to mirror the 73GBs for the OS and Raid 5 the 146GBs, but you will sacrifice space and performance, especially with SATA drives. But you will gain some redundancy. One final thought. You don't say if the controller will let you hardware RAID or if you plan on using software RAID. My advice is stay away from Software RAID. Bob Fronk From: Aaron T. Rohyans [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 9:08 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Domain Controller HD setup Ok folks - question time... Being the "just good enough to be dangerous" type at anything other than Cisco, I thought I would pose this question to the group for some insight. I am in the process of building our new DC. We are a small shop of about 75 employees, so we host AD, Exchange, File Sharing, and BlackBerry Server off of this one server. My question is... how would you guys setup your hard drives in this bad boy for optimal results (primarily for Exchange)? Right now, from the factory it came with 2 x 73Gb SATA and 3 x 146Gb SATA in no RAID. I was thinking of mirroring the 73Gb HDs together for the OS install, but after that I'm not sure what would be best. We have roughly 80Gb of crap that we'll need to store for File Sharing. Any thoughts? Thanks all! Aaron This email and any attached files are confidential and intended solely for the intended recipient(s). If you are not the named recipient you should not read, distribute, copy or alter this email. Any views or opinions expressed in this email are those of the author and do not represent those of the Davis H. Elliot Company . Warning: Although precautions have been taken to make sure no viruses are present in this email, the company cannot accept responsibility for any loss or damage that arise from the use of this email or attachments. ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
