Released: Calculator Updates Galore!

Would it be possible to add a choice in the Calculator for Enterprise vs. Standard edition?

We can't justify the price difference between Editions versus our ratio of servers/databases.

We build w/ Standard edition and 5 databases per server.  

In my proposed Ex2013 architecture of 14 Standard Ed. in the DAG.  The price breakpoint for 2 Enterprise Ed. in the DAG, doesn't compare for us, much less 4 or more Enterprise editions.  

The calculator - from what I can see - assumes Enterprise Edition w/ 100 DB's per server.

Ross, have you ever though to make connection from Calculator to the existing environment (or single server) to pull some initialization data? (user profiles etc..)

Ross,  my current customer asked a question on the blog page for the previous release:

"Mike DiVergilio [Cox]

Since you cannot override the RAID settings when using 7.2K RPM drives, does this imply that Microsoft does not support that configuration? TechNet states you support all RAID types, but the calculator doesn't give you the latitude to make that decision. While you prefer RAID 1/0 when using slower disks, certain storage vendors have capabilities in the array that can offset some of the performance implication, such as storage pools, thin provisioning and fast cache."

Will you enable the Calc to show the details of a forced RAID 5, please Sir?

Are there any plans to improve the calculator and separate the number of servers from the number of database copies?

For example, I have a 14 node DAG which comprises of 2 LAG servers and 12 HA Servers.  I only require, however, 3 HA copies of each database.  I therefore have databases as follows:

HA Svr 01 : DB01, DB02 and DB03

HA Svr 02 : DB01, DB02 and DB03

HA Svr 03 : DB01, DB02 and DB03

HA Svr 04 : DB04, DB05 and DB06

HA Svr 05 : DB04, DB05 and DB06

HA Svr 06 : DB04, DB05 and DB06

HA Svr 07 : DB07, DB08 and DB09

HA Svr 08 : DB07, DB08 and DB09

HA Svr 09 : DB07, DB08 and DB09

HA Svr 10 : DB10, DB12 and DB12

HA Svr 11 : DB10, DB12 and DB12

HA Svr 12 : DB10, DB12 and DB12

LAG Svr 1 : DBs 01-06

LAG Svr 2 : DBs 07-12

The reason being is that I can utilise the extra capacity of the 2 LAG servers in terms of spare CPU etc since they will never host active users.  (This is only an example but demonstrates my point)

I can't seem to model this in the calculator as the number of HA servers is equal to the number of DB copies in the tool.  It doesn't seem quite right to model as 3 separate DAGs as this doesn't leverage effective use of the LAG servers as doing so would create multiple LAG servers (i.e. in this example I would end up with 6 LAG servers - 2 per DAG).

I hope this makes sense and you can see what I am trying to achieve - i.e. isolate DB copies from HA servers

@pesos, the DailyPerformanceLog folder in particular self-regulates itself. You'll notice it keeps a maximum number of files and then starts deleting the oldest day's file each day.

Thanks Ross - can you provide further detail, or will the team be doing so soon?

@Pesos - yes you will need to manage some of those directories.

@Julien Taisne - The calculator does take into account the ratio.  If you have questions about the output, you can send mail to the address listed in the calculator; please include a copy of the calculator.

@chromeyello - stay tuned.

Thanks Ross. Do you have any idea when the Exchange 2013 Multi-Tenant Scale Guidance document will be released? I'm not talking about the Hosting Guidance Document which is already available.

Hi Ross & Exchange Team,

First, thanks for this amazing job !

Can you tell me about the "Recommended Min Number of GC Cores" ?

The value should be about "Exchange servers Core Number" / 8, isn't it ?

Refering to : blogs.technet.com/.../ask-the-perf-guy-sizing-exchange-2013-deployments.aspx

"Active Directory sizing remains the same as it was for Exchange 2010. As we gain more experience with production deployments we may adjust this in the future. For Exchange 2013, we recommend deploying a ratio of 1 Active Directory global catalog processor core for every 8 Mailbox role processor cores handling active load, assuming 64-bit global catalog servers."

The storage Calculator, in our sizing environement, gives us a 51/1 result, is there a mistake ?

Regards,

Julien

Hi Ross,

Does the calculator (or any other tool) address the rapid growth of log files on the C drive (or install volume) of Exchange 2013?  The "DailyPerformanceLogs" folder grows by roughly 600 mb a day.  Is there an end in sight for this logging or do we need to be doing manual cleanup?

Thanks!