Hi! This is my first post to the Exchange Team Blog - hope this is of use! My name is Robert Gillies, and I'm a Senior Consultant in the Federal Civilian Practice of Microsoft Consulting Services. ...
Published May 05, 2008
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RobK - great question. Wiht the 32-bit bersion of the Exchange bits, you can get clustering to work, and you can mount up to 5 databases. Also, keep in mind that Enterprise Edition is required for CCR (production/64-bit Enterprise Edition can go to 50 databases).
The two biggest limitations I ran into were the limitation on databases (my customer is going to have 42 databases, so my production install script wants to create 42 SGs and DBs - I had to test with 5) and the fact that you can't license a 32-bit CCR cluster. When you run the "Set-ExchangeServer" cmdlet with the "-ProductKey" parameter and a valid product key, you will get an error thrown saying you can't license CCR on 32-bit. You can license all of the other servers, just not the CCR cluster!
This is great because it lets you test even CCR on your 32-bit Virtual PC and Virtual Server labs, but I am looking forward to getting my lab rebuilt on 64-bit Windows Server 2003 on my Hyper-V RC1!! (That and moving to 64-bit Windows Server 2008!)
The two biggest limitations I ran into were the limitation on databases (my customer is going to have 42 databases, so my production install script wants to create 42 SGs and DBs - I had to test with 5) and the fact that you can't license a 32-bit CCR cluster. When you run the "Set-ExchangeServer" cmdlet with the "-ProductKey" parameter and a valid product key, you will get an error thrown saying you can't license CCR on 32-bit. You can license all of the other servers, just not the CCR cluster!
This is great because it lets you test even CCR on your 32-bit Virtual PC and Virtual Server labs, but I am looking forward to getting my lab rebuilt on 64-bit Windows Server 2003 on my Hyper-V RC1!! (That and moving to 64-bit Windows Server 2008!)