Exchange 2010 - The Complete Solution

There you sit, An IT Professional with an interest in Microsoft Exchange. You have this old Exchange 2003 architecture and you look longingly at all your drinking buddies who have a nice corner of a SAN and lots of copies. They're still not happy because they keep getting beat up by their managers because they blew the budget on servers and storage. They keep getting beat up by their virtualization team because they're still a bit legacy and were too afraid to put the Exchange on a hypervisor. Basically they may well be crowing down the pub but it's the Triumph ale talking because they're not much better off. That's why they go there during happy hour because it's $3 rather than $5 a pint at all other times.

What's a guy to do? Well, put it all together.

1. Take your Exchange server plans and give them to the virtualization team. If you have (say) 10 servers at 20GB of C drive each they're going to be able to give you those same servers, increase their disk performance and do it all in less than the space for one copy; 18/20GB rather than 200GB of spinning.

2. Get your storage guys to co-locate the LUNs for DAGStore1 in the same FlexVol. Co-locate the LUNs for DAGStore2 in a new FlexVol and so forth. Allow your storage guys to deduplicate them on condition that they load the disk metadata into FlashCache (also here).

What have you done?
1. The virtualization guys owe you a beer because they increased their influence.
2. The storage guys owe you a beer because you didn't consume tons of unnecessary disk and floor-tiles.
3. You owe you a beer because you have a great 2+1 DAG.
4. The owe you another beer because you still 'own' the DR plan and don't need to worry about VMotion and SRM.
5. The VMware guys owe you a second beer because Exchange DR isn't their problem.
6. The business owes you a beer because you dun good.

Six beers. That's a decent night out. Make it a Friday or a Saturday though so you're clear-headed for work.