Robert’s Rules of Exchange: Multi-Role Servers

@GoodThings2Life - Thanks for the comments!  Just wanted to say two things:

First, everyone needs to be aware that our guidance states that having UM servers on a virtual platform is not supported.  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx, in the section titled Server Virtualization, this is specifically called out.  This is primarily because of scalability concerns for customers larger than yours.  Because of your relatively small organization, this might not cause you issues, but as your org grows, you should be aware of this.

Second, just wanted to let everyone know that this is not just an architecture for the small or medium sized organizations.  Microsoft is recommending this multi-role server architecture for customers of all size.  I am workign with a customer that has about 1.5 million seats, and we are strongly recommending to that customer all three of the core roles collocated.  On these larger organizations, we see significant cost savings in both capital expenditures and operational expenditures with this collocation of server roles!