Hi, I have currently a single Exchange 2003 server that does everything. We are a small office of 50 people. I want to replace it with a new server and Exchange 2010. I have been reading a lot of books about it and they all have examples and discussions about setting up exchange with 4 seperate servers in different roles. It would be very had for me to get funding to have 4 servers with 4 windows server licences and 4 exchange licences and i don't see a need to have that level of complexity for our network. What i would like to know is can i still have a single Exchange server that does everything? If yes, do i have to install each of the roles onto the one server or do i just install some master role that does it all? Does anyone know of a guide / walkthrough that i can download that gives this scenario as an example? Thanks for your help Ian

Hey Ian, This is a great question that my customers ask me all the time. Simply put one server will be just fine. For your 50 users I would actually recommend that you virtualize this exchange server. I would watch some of my videos on www.insidetheregistry.com -- I have a nice walkthrough on performance tuning an Exchange Server. The real key of this single server is that you tune your store.exe to ensure that it doesn't consume all the RAM. I have done this a lot at it works great. I would however let you know that you will require a new server for this as Exchange 2010 requires 64 bit and you will likely need between 6 - 8 GB of RAM to run this properly. Think of it this way -- for such a small environment you will need approximately - 2 GB Ram for OS / 2 GB for CAS / 2 GB for HUB / and 2 GB for MBX. So 8 GB total. Tune your store.exe as per my video to 4 GB of RAM and you will be just fine. Also if you have Blackberries you will be required to upgrade to version 5.x. Activesync devices swing over just fine. Thanks and I hope this helps, Dave Kawula Principal Consultant TriCon Technical Services Inc. www.triconts.com www.insidetheregistry.com dkawula@triconts.com

Thanks. I'll have a look at the site. I am virtulising the servers with VMware (thats another set of books that i'm reading) with Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise x64. I'm going to have 48gb of ram on each physical server (i'll have 3 physical servers with an average of 2 VMs running on each) so i was thinking of giving the Exchange VM 16 or 24gb of ram. Is more ram always better? can i hurt performance by giving it too much? It's all new hardware and software and i'll migrate accross from the old hardware as i install each VM server (but only one for exchange). Ian

How many users are you talking about? The best suggestion i can give you is to use E2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/09/453117.aspx You can download it from http://msexchangeteam.com/files/default.aspx Generally, the more the better will Exchange work. Jonas Andersson MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010 | MCITP: EMA 2007/2010 | MCSE/MCSA Blog: http://www.testlabs.se/blog