With storage virtualization prevelant in pretty much every vendor today, I'm curious as to what other engineers designing Exchange 2010 are using in the mailbox calculator for raid types as it relates to storage pools in the subsystem. XIV spreads across all spindles, VNX contains an Exchange provising wizard for it's pool and HDS uses Dynamic Provisioning in their AMS line. Are you keeping Exchange out of the pool(s) or if the vendor supports it putting it into a pool? Thanks in advance, Chris

Each vendor will make their own recommendation but the safe direction is to ensure that your vendor provides you with the IO and capacity from whatever pool of disk space they carve out for you. If the vendor is going to mix workloads then you need to be assured that your Exchange workload is either segregated or all the potential IO has been taken into account where the pool has been designed. If you look at a NetApp solution you will find that separate Aggregates are recommended (if not actually mandated) for Exchange workloads. That keeps you separate from, say, SQL or CIFS loads which sit in other aggregates. "Christopher Meehan" wrote in message news:72ba64e7-56c2-4ee0-92d5-01726c2e7bfd... With storage virtualization prevelant in pretty much every vendor today, I'm curious as to what other engineers designing Exchange 2010 are using in the mailbox calculator for raid types as it relates to storage pools in the subsystem. XIV spreads across all spindles, VNX contains an Exchange provising wizard for it's pool and HDS uses Dynamic Provisioning in their AMS line. Are you keeping Exchange out of the pool(s) or if the vendor supports it putting it into a pool? Thanks in advance, Chris Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.

Each vendor will make their own recommendation but the safe direction is to ensure that your vendor provides you with the IO and capacity from whatever pool of disk space they carve out for you. If the vendor is going to mix workloads then you need to be assured that your Exchange workload is either segregated or all the potential IO has been taken into account where the pool has been designed. If you look at a NetApp solution you will find that separate Aggregates are recommended (if not actually mandated) for Exchange workloads. That keeps you separate from, say, SQL or CIFS loads which sit in other aggregates. "Christopher Meehan" wrote in message news:72ba64e7-56c2-4ee0-92d5-01726c2e7bfd... With storage virtualization prevelant in pretty much every vendor today, I'm curious as to what other engineers designing Exchange 2010 are using in the mailbox calculator for raid types as it relates to storage pools in the subsystem. XIV spreads across all spindles, VNX contains an Exchange provising wizard for it's pool and HDS uses Dynamic Provisioning in their AMS line. Are you keeping Exchange out of the pool(s) or if the vendor supports it putting it into a pool? Thanks in advance, Chris Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.

Mark, thanks for the reply and while I understand thoroughly the ramifications of mixing exchange I/O in a storage pool with other workloads and would never do so, I was more speaking about from an exchange engineers sizing perspective, how do you factor virtualized storage into your mailbox calculator sizing. Do you override the raid config and specify manually? How do you factor in fast vp pools and autoteiring in EMC or do you not use it for Exchange? Do we need to start factoring cache more as Exchange changes how it operates in certain areas such as online maintenance being 24x7 in the background and 32kb pages? I was more trying to pick the brain of people who are doing lots of design and sizing with various different storage vendors. More of like open discussion I guess versus a question with a single answer. In our case as it seems you are a consultant as well, freqently we are the ones who determine what happens in the storage array instead of the vendor/customer telling us how much I/O they can give us, other times thats not the case and we use what is available. thanks for the response though.. Appreciate the feedback. Chris

Mark, thanks for the reply and while I understand thoroughly the ramifications of mixing exchange I/O in a storage pool with other workloads and would never do so, I was more speaking about from an exchange engineers sizing perspective, how do you factor virtualized storage into your mailbox calculator sizing. Do you override the raid config and specify manually? How do you factor in fast vp pools and autoteiring in EMC or do you not use it for Exchange? Do we need to start factoring cache more as Exchange changes how it operates in certain areas such as online maintenance being 24x7 in the background and 32kb pages? I was more trying to pick the brain of people who are doing lots of design and sizing with various different storage vendors. More of like open discussion I guess versus a question with a single answer. In our case as it seems you are a consultant as well, freqently we are the ones who determine what happens in the storage array instead of the vendor/customer telling us how much I/O they can give us, other times thats not the case and we use what is available. thanks for the response though.. Appreciate the feedback. Chris

You largely throw away the MS calculator once youve filled in the mailbox profile and DAG information. You certainly dont look at the MS numbers on RAID and try to superimpose that on your design. Those calcs in the MS spreadsheet are for DAS and dont follow through for multi-vendor sizing exercised. Each vendor will take your raw request data and run it through their own tools. If youre an end-customer you cant do this yourself but if youre a partner reseller you will have access to these tools so that you can properly size the environments. If you are a consultant you do the design and ignore all the RAID. You tell the competing vendors about the number of servers, databases, db size and all that normal stuff. The vendors then come back to you with the storage design. I work for one of those vendors who will come to you with that storage design. Its my job to give you the IOPS, not yours. You just tell me how many you want. For things like BDM yes, you tell the vendor whether you are doing 24/7 BDM or whether its being done in a window like in the old days. You as a consultant simply cannot do a RAID-level design. You (maybe) dont know about NetApp Flash Cache and how that changes things. You might not know about RAID-DP which is a RAID 6 but not like EMCs RAID 6. And EMCs autotiering helps in a different way. XIV is another case. The layout is very different. When you give the vendors your Exchange sizing spreadsheet you will sit down with them and they will confirm the assumptions and all the things that need to be factored in on top of the plain Exchange requirements. "Christopher Meehan" wrote in message news:c514f692-581b-49d1-86ad-a35a329c0d90... Mark, thanks for the reply and while I understand thoroughly the ramifications of mixing exchange I/O in a storage pool with other workloads and would never do so, I was more speaking about from an exchange engineers sizing perspective, how do you factor virtualized storage into your mailbox calculator sizing. Do you override the raid config and specify manually? How do you factor in fast vp pools and autoteiring in EMC or do you not use it for Exchange? Do we need to start factoring cache more as Exchange changes how it operates in certain areas such as online maintenance being 24x7 in the background and 32kb pages? I was more trying to pick the brain of people who are doing lots of design and sizing with various different storage vendors. More of like open discussion I guess versus a question with a single answer. In our case as it seems you are a consultant as well, freqently we are the ones who determine what happens in the storage array instead of the vendor/customer telling us how much I/O they can give us, other times thats not the case and we use what is available. thanks for the response though.. Appreciate the feedback. Chris Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.

Thanks. I was starting to feel like less and less the raid and storage options in the calculator were fitting in with the designs and storage platforms I'm usually working with. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't the only one out there who was using that part of the workbook less and less. Thanks again for the input, definetly helps. Chris