We're in the process of purchasing a new Windows Server 2008 to host our Exchange Server 2007. Yes we know Exchange 2010 is available but we're not going to use that yet. The new server will host about 45 mailboxes ranging from less than 1GB to about 8GB in size. They're currently hosted on an Exchange Server 2003 which will eventually be moved to the new server. Our daily transaction logs activity is about 1GB which is flushed every night when full Exchange db backup runs. This is what we have in mind: Dell PowerEdge T410 12GB Memory (3x4GB), 1333MHz Dual Ranked RDIMMs Intel Xeon E5607, 2.26GHz, 8M Cache, 4 Cores Single Processor Only 146GB 15K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 3.5in Hotplug Hard Drive 1 PERC RAID controller RAID 10 configuration with 4 SAS HDs Is the above config acceptable for our environment? Should we just configure 1 huge partition for both OS and Exchange transaction logs + database? Or should we set aside 50GB (for example) for OS + transaction logs and another partition for Exchange database? We need feedback from Exchange experts. Thanks much.

1. I would seperate the drives/partitions for the OS/database/logs. 2. I'd also apply the latest SP for 2008.Sukh

For single server not implementing DAGs use the old convention of creating separate raid groups for T-logs and Databases if you can. The difference in IO pattern for read vs write for 2010 is not that far apart due to the dramatic reduction in read IOs so you dont' see as much benefit of isolating the IO pattern as you did with 2007 and 2003. James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com