Overview

No man is an island and Exchange can't run without good and sufficient hardware. The performance characteristics of Exchange 5.5 are well known. The basic principles to achieve good system performance were laid down when Exchange 4.0 was released in 1996, and haven't changed much since. Sure, the Store expanded its capacity for the size of a single database to a theoretical limit of 16TB in the enterprise edition of Exchange 5.5, but the same essential characteristics are still valid. The hot spots are the Store and DS databases, their transaction logs, the Windows NT swap file, and the MTA work directory. Given the speed of modern day processors, anyone can put together a configuration to support 1,000 or even 2,000 mailboxes.

Exchange 2000 is a different beast. The Store has evolved dramatically and the simple split between the private and public databases is at a point where the architecture specifies support for up to 90 databases running on a single server, even if it isn't fully implemented in Exchange 2000. IIS is much more important to Exchange than it ever was in the past. The streaming file or database is available to hold native Internet content and is integrated in a seamless manner with the MAPI-oriented property database, and all can be accessed through ExIFS. The AD has replaced the DS, and the server boasts a new SMTP-based routing and queuing engine to replace the older X.400-based MTA. All this is delivered in a customizable package that's likely...