We currently have an Exchange 2007 server that performs as the Hub, CAS and Mailbox server. Users can access OWA from this server, which has a security certificate. It's in a single domain that has a number of Server 2008 servers running that replicate. These are at a number of sites all on VPNs. It all works fine except the Exchange box is getting somewhat overloaded - disk I/O issues. We've just purchased an additional server to handle Exchange - this has 6 disks that have been configured with RAID 1 to give 3 available disks. I had planned to try and transfer the whole of the Exchange to the new machine and then take the old one out of service. However, having done a bit more reading, I thinik I might benefit by adding the new machine as a 2nd Exchange server and transferring a lot of the load onto this. My question is what do you recommend I do? I have read that all I need to do is install Exchange on the new machine and it will find the existing Exchange box. Then what? Might seem like a dopey question but being the one and only IT guy here I get to manage everything from the toaster to the Exchange server so Jack of all trades and master of none! Thanks.

How many thousands of users are we talking here? Its going to take quite a bit of hammer to overload a server, unless it was severely underpowered to begin with...... If you have maybe three or four thousand users youre into needing a second box and then youre going to want to split the load. If you only have a couple of thousand users then one suggestion might be to do a complete transfer from one server to another in its entirety. As you can see its best if you provided some more information because your solution depends heavily on what your inputs are. "Nick Wass" wrote in message news:c804e673-dee0-41a9-81fa-76ff4901bdfc... We currently have an Exchange 2007 server that performs as the Hub, CAS and Mailbox server. Users can access OWA from this server, which has a security certificate. It's in a single domain that has a number of Server 2008 servers running that replicate. These are at a number of sites all on VPNs. It all works fine except the Exchange box is getting somewhat overloaded - disk I/O issues. We've just purchased an additional server to handle Exchange - this has 6 disks that have been configured with RAID 1 to give 3 available disks. I had planned to try and transfer the whole of the Exchange to the new machine and then take the old one out of service. However, having done a bit more reading, I thinik I might benefit by adding the new machine as a 2nd Exchange server and transferring a lot of the load onto this. My question is what do you recommend I do? I have read that all I need to do is install Exchange on the new machine and it will find the existing Exchange box. Then what? Might seem like a dopey question but being the one and only IT guy here I get to manage everything from the toaster to the Exchange server so Jack of all trades and master of none! Thanks. Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.

We have around 250 mailboxes plus around 12 public folders. Now I know that is really small and should not really overload the server. However the machine is slow. It's a single Xeon CPU with 6GB RAM and a pair of 250GB disk configured as RAID1. The diagnostic tool reports a disk bottleneck. The same machine runs Symantec Mail for Exchange. A significant number of users use OWA both internally and externally. I understand that it is much better to run the Exchange DB on a separate disk and the logs on another, that is the reason for the new multiple disk machine. I wondered if it is better to let the existing machine act as the front end server and to set the new machine up to handle the mailboxes? I am also concerned that the existing Exchange server may be connecting to one of our domain controllers at a remote office instead of the local domain controller, but can't find how I can ascertain if this is the case.

Youre probably wasting your time. At some point in the relatively near future youre going to retire that old server and then what are you going to do? You have so few mailboxes and PFs that you should seriously consider entirely retiring the old box having done a total migration of everything to the new one. If the new box is sufficiently beefy theres the option of making it a Hyper-V host and having a couple of guests inside it so that you have MBX on one guest and Hub/CAS on the other. Your call though, but I would not retain the old server at all. "Nick Wass" wrote in message news:f7d2de6f-7869-4123-840a-c76560636135... We have around 250 mailboxes plus around 12 public folders. Now I know that is really small and should not really overload the server. However the machine is slow. It's a single Xeon CPU with 6GB RAM and a pair of 250GB disk configured as RAID1. The diagnostic tool reports a disk bottleneck. The same machine runs Symantec Mail for Exchange. A significant number of users use OWA both internally and externally. I understand that it is much better to run the Exchange DB on a separate disk and the logs on another, that is the reason for the new multiple disk machine. I wondered if it is better to let the existing machine act as the front end server and to set the new machine up to handle the mailboxes? I am also concerned that the existing Exchange server may be connecting to one of our domain controllers at a remote office instead of the local domain controller, but can't find how I can ascertain if this is the case. Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.