Microsoft
configurations as well as multi-role deployments for Exchange 2007 and 2010. Customers could use this information to design their solution. Historically the Exchange Calculator sheet was meant to validate the design.
For Exchange 2013 this information was replaced by a single blog post (http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/05/06/ask-the-perf-guy-sizing-exchange-2013-deployments.aspx)
and now the recommendation is to use the Calculator sheet to *design* your environment. (bullet #2 under the Deployment Practices section of this article).
So one could say that the Exchange team contributed to badly designed Exchange 2013 environments by failing to supply the required information in a similar way to the Exchange 2007 and 2010 documentation.
Another thing is the N-1 updating policy. This is a complex area and there are many reasons why organizations currently cannot implement such a policy. One of the reasons is that every Exchange 2013 CU is an SP and cannot be rolled back. The second one is of
course that the QA of released updates still keeps failing, most recently with Exchange 2013 CU6 and UR8 for 2010 SP3. So if you want customers to follow that policy, keep investing in the quality of the updates and try to make the update process less impact
for customers, for instance by providing a roll-back option.
@Paul Newel: Not often recommended is not the same as generally not recommended.
