Exchange 2007 enables much better memory utilization than Exchange 2003 due to its 64-bit architecture. Because of the virtual address space limitations of a 32-bit platform, Exchange 2003 is limited to using 4 GB or less of physical memory.

The memory configuration process for the Mailbox role is more involved than the other roles since the optimal memory configuration depends upon the mailbox count, client profile and number of storage groups.

The recommended configuration for the Mailbox role is based predominantly on mailbox count and user profile.The rule of thumb sizing for the Mailbox server role requires an understanding of the average client user profile. This profile can be collected using the Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer (EPA).

 

 

The maximum number of Storage Groups configurable in Exchange 2007 has been increased to 50 in the Enterprise Edition (up from 4 with Exchange 2003) and 5 in Standard Edition (up from 1 with Exchange 2003). This increase provides much greater flexibility in server/storage architecture, but the increase has a significant effect on the memory utilization of the Exchange 2007 Mailbox server so Storage Group count is now a factor in minimum memory configuration for Mailbox and Multi-Role servers. In Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1), several performance enhancements were made to the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) that reduce the memory requirements for the Mailbox server role. The following table identifies the specific minimum memory requirements per server, based on the number of storage groups on the server for Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2007 SP1.

 

Storage Group Count	Minimum Required Physical Memory
1-4	2 GB
5-8	4 GB
9-12	5 GB
13-16	6 GB
17-20	7 GB
21-24	8 GB
25-28	9 GB
29-32	10 GB
33-36	11 GB
37-40	12 GB
41-44	13 GB
45-48	14 GB
49-50	15 GB

 

Based on the above information, the following table can be used to assist in estimating the memory requirements of a given mailbox server with a given number of hosted mailboxes with a given profile type:

 

User Type	Recommended memory
Light	SG Minimum + 2 MB per mailbox
Average	SG Minimum + 3.5 MB per mailbox
Heavy	SG Minimum + 5 MB per mailbox

 

More more information, see the Exchange 2007: Planning Memory Configurations guide on Microsoft Technet.

Something humorous to get the week started!

If you are connected to Live Messenger 24 hours a day like I am, you are undoubtedly annoyed by those ads down the bottom that pop-up and make a noise if your mouse cursor happens to go anywhere near them..

A simple way to get rid of them is with APatch (www.apatch.org). Download it, run it and on page 2/6 check the "Remove Advertisement" checkbox, complete the wizard and there you go, ad free messenger!

Microsoft have announced the release of Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Customers will be able to purchase the release, currently in private beta testing, beginning in February 2009.

A few of the new features are:

• Dial-in audioconferencing
• Desktop sharing
• Persistent group chat
• Attendant console and delegation
• APIs and Visual Studio integration

For more info, click here

I came across this issues on a ISA 2006 proxy server the other day. Basically, if you are logging to a MSDE database you may experience high memory usage by SQL server because the amount of physical memory that is allocated for SQL Server is not limited by default.

It is possible to limit the amount of physical memory that is allocated for SQL Server. Recommended values are:

System Memory - Setting

1 GB - 386 MB

2 GB - 512 MB

3 GB - 764 MB

4 GB - 1024 MB

For detailed information on how to set these limits, see the following Microsoft KB article

Err.. yeah.. so, there you are, you need to copy something from your apple mac to your external disk, but it wont allow you.. the disk is not full and it works perfectly on windows.??

I recently encountered this problem, the drive was formatted as NTFS (and why wouldn't it be?) turns out macs can read files off NTFS drives, but they cannot write to an NTFS drive.

Ok, so what now? You can format your external hard drive as FAT32 partition or NTFS-3G

NTFS-3G is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, BeOS and Haiku. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Once installed, it will allow you to write to your NTFS drive without a problem!

Anyone who has played around with server 2008 and hyper-v would have noticed that you are not able to bind a virtual network to a wireless network adapter and more than likely (although i have not personally tested it) a 3g or other mobile broadband card. I guess the reason for this is that most people would probably not need to do this, BUT, I did.. after asking google, I found 3 ways around this, my preferred method is the last one.

Methods:

• Using ICS - see Ben Armstrong's blog
• Using RRAS - see Ken Schaefer's blog
• Using Bridging - see John Paul Cook's blog