What is the best practice for organizing mailboxes in Storage Groups or Stores? I've got 18 departments and 600 mailboxes. - Put an even number of mailboxes in each store? - Put an entire department in one store or spread across multiple stores?

What version of exchange are you running? I think this alot depends on SLA and recovery time requirements. You want to do 1 SG and 1 Message store. Also how are the LUNs laid out underneath?Mark Morowczynski|MCT| MCSE 2003:Messaging, Security|MCITP:EMA 2K7,EDA Win 7,ES,SA,EA|MCTS:Windows Mobile Admin|Security+|http://almostdailytech.com

Exchange 2003. Right now we don't have an SLA but we need recovery time to be as fast as possible. We have one 500GB LUN for the Storage Groups and Stores. Our old Exchange 2000 server had two Storage Groups and four messages stores per storage group and I'm trying to figure out how to best organize Exchange 2003.

On Sat, 2-Jan-10 17:29:12 GMT, jtlg wrote:>Exchange 2003. Right now we don't have an SLA but we need recovery time to be as fast as possible. That's a pretty nebulous statement. You can have everyone up andrunning in a few minutes if a "dial-tone" recovery is acceptable. Ifit's not then the size of the database will govern how long it takesto restore.>We have one 500GB LUN for the Storage Groups and Stores. Our old Exchange 2000 server had two Storage Groups and four messages stores per storage group and I'm trying to figure out how to best organize Exchange 2003. Your choices are pretty much the same. If what you did worked for youbefore, continue doing the same thing now -- or move to Exchange 2007or 2010. Then you'll have better choices (CCR, or DAG), more storagegroups (or databases), etc.Having everything on one LUN isn't always the best storage layout,either.---Rich MatheisenMCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

It would be bettwe to keep less count of MBX store in one SG (for recovery). If you have ENT version of exchange 2003 go for one store in one SG with 100 mailbox so you can recover DB in less time. Have below link for OptimizatioOptimizing Storage for Exchange Server 2003:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125079%28EXCHG.65%29.aspxAnil