Any Exchange Server 2013 deployment should include the use of the server sizing calculator published by Microsoft. This calculator represents the best and latest sizing guidance available for Exchange Server 2013, based on real world deployments.
As such, the calculator does vary over time, with changes such as minor calculation fixes all the way up to major changes such as the additional CPU requirements for MAPI-over-HTTP released in Service Pack 1.
You can download the Exchange 2013 Server Role Requirements calculator from TechNet. Always check to make sure you are downloading the latest version.
A detailed walk through of the calculator is beyond the scope of this guide due to the evolving nature of the guidance it provides. However it is recommended that you refer to the following Microsoft content to better understand how the calculator is used:
- Plan it the right way – Exchange Server 2013 sizing scenarios (MEC 2014 session recording)
- Ask the Perf Guy: Sizing Exchange 2013 Deployments
The Exchange Server Pro organization is aligning with the Preferred Architecture, which means for server and storage sizing they will use:
- A DAG with four members spanning two sites
- Multi-role servers
- No virtualization
- RAID1 disk pair for the operating system volume
- JBOD storage for database/log volumes
- Multiple databases per volume
- One hot spare disk per server
- AutoReseed enabled
- Four copies per database, one of which is a lagged copy
All of these factors are taken into consideration for server sizing, following the guidance provided by Microsoft.
In the next article in this series we’ll look at preparing Active Directory for Exchange Server 2013 installation.
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Thanks for posting this series of articles related to Exchange 2013.
It would be nice if there was a link to the next article in the series. For example in the last sentence “In the next article in this series we’ll look at preparing Active Directory for Exchange Server 2013 installation.” you could make preparing Active Directory for Exchange Server 2013 a hyperlink to the next article.
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Author Paul Cunningham acts as a real person and passed all tests against spambots. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.
There’s a link at the end of each part that takes you back to the index.