Yes. You can do it on Azure. I set Exchange up once as a test "just because".
(You can probably do it on S3, I simply have never done it.)
I would suggest that going to Best Buy and picking up a $600 desktop with 8 GB
RAM would be a better investment of your dollars. Install Win8, Server2012 or
You say "host 4,000 mailboxes". Is that 4,000 mailboxes total or 4,000 active
mailboxes?
That makes a huge difference.
In Exchange 2010, even if mailboxes are inactive, based on the way DAGs are
designed, you need to treat all mailboxes hosted on a server as active from an
IO perspective (not