Microsoft publishes plenty of guidance on planning and sizing Exchange Server 2010 deployments, as well as deployment tools to help with load testing. However despite this there is often still some lingering doubt about just how well a given solution will work once it is subjected to real world conditions.
Fortunately Microsoft has now made this situation slightly easier thanks to the release of these Exchange 2010 Tested Solution whitepapers. There are three whitepapers covering the following solutions:
- 500 Mailboxes in a Single Site Running Hyper-V on Dell Servers
- 9000 Mailboxes in Two Sites Running Hyper-V on Dell M610 Servers, Dell EqualLogic Storage, and F5 Load Balancing Solutions
- 16000 Mailboxes in a Single Site Deployed on IBM and Brocade Hardware
Each guide walks through the entire project covering
- The discovery and planning of the Exchange environment
- The exact calculations used to size the new environment
- How and why incorrect design decisions were avoided
- How the solution was tested and validated
These guides are a must read for anyone who is planning an Exchange Server 2010 deployment.