Many of you have heard about the changes we've made in Exchange 2010 that combine to give you the ability to use less expensive storage and deploy large mailboxes. There have been many discussion...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Hey Seth,
In order to deploy your mailbox databases on JBOD, you need to have at least 3 database copies - which means at least 3 mailbox servers. Assuming you are deploying 3 copies, it really comes down to two things - ensuring you do not exceed either the IO characteristics or capacity characteristics of the drive. As an example, if your user profile is 150 messages per day, then you can expect your IO profile to be around .15 per mailbox. With a 7.2k SATA disk you can expect to achieve 55 IOPS, so you are looking at a maximum of 300 mailboxes (some fluff factors added). Now you look at your capacity and dial down the number of mailboxes there; so maybe for 2GB mailboxes you can still handle 300 mailboxes per disk. So now you know that you need 2 databases to handle your 500 mailboxes, which means you'll have a total of 2 disks per server.
As for sleep loss - I think the key thing there is that you are building enough redundancy in teh system so you don't have to worry. By having 3 or more copies, if you lose a single copy, you still have two other copies to fall back on - one that is the active copy, and another that is a passive copy and a seeding source for third copy when you replace the disk.
Now as to whether you want to deploy this architecture for your organization, will really depend on a multitude of factors, one of which will be cost.
Hope this helps,
Ross
In order to deploy your mailbox databases on JBOD, you need to have at least 3 database copies - which means at least 3 mailbox servers. Assuming you are deploying 3 copies, it really comes down to two things - ensuring you do not exceed either the IO characteristics or capacity characteristics of the drive. As an example, if your user profile is 150 messages per day, then you can expect your IO profile to be around .15 per mailbox. With a 7.2k SATA disk you can expect to achieve 55 IOPS, so you are looking at a maximum of 300 mailboxes (some fluff factors added). Now you look at your capacity and dial down the number of mailboxes there; so maybe for 2GB mailboxes you can still handle 300 mailboxes per disk. So now you know that you need 2 databases to handle your 500 mailboxes, which means you'll have a total of 2 disks per server.
As for sleep loss - I think the key thing there is that you are building enough redundancy in teh system so you don't have to worry. By having 3 or more copies, if you lose a single copy, you still have two other copies to fall back on - one that is the active copy, and another that is a passive copy and a seeding source for third copy when you replace the disk.
Now as to whether you want to deploy this architecture for your organization, will really depend on a multitude of factors, one of which will be cost.
Hope this helps,
Ross