size of Exchange box

[admin_2]

We're ordering Compaq hardware to run Exchange 2000 now, while planning in the near future for Unity 3.01 with full Exchange 2000/AD support.<br><br>As a small company with only 170 employees, we're only planning to run one Exchange box, which would be hosted in our office and then (in 8 to 12 months) migrated to a datacenter. With an installation of this size, we would love to use the all-in-one Exchange/Unity configuration. <br><br>My questions:<br>1) We're planning to store Exchange stuff on a fiber channel SAN - the choice is between a Compaq DL580 with 4 processors and 1-2 GB ram or a DL 380 with 2 processors and 1 GB ram - do we really need four processors for 170 heavy users in the all-in-one configuration?<br><br>2) Would clustering the two Exchange boxes to increase availability (Exchange 2000 using W2K Advanced Server) affect Unity? <br><br>3) Would option 2 work if we were interfacing to our Definity G3, as opposed to going ahead and migrating to CallManager and IP phones?<br><br>4) Is there any reason that we couldn't put the Exchange/Unity box (and Callmanager as well?) in a datacenter to service 20 small offices ranging from 3 to 50 users (again, 170 users total)?<br><br>5) Would we still need an additional box for ActiveFax/UnityFax?<br><br>Nathan Carter<br>VP Technology<br>Teach For America<br>NY, NY<br><br>

[#2]

1. I can’t imagine you need 4 processors for 170 users… I guess that depends on how “heavy” the “heavy users” are. The 2 processor box sounds plenty beefy to me.

2. As Anil mentioned, having Unity installed as part of an Exchange cluster isn’t support and will give you some grief… at least at the moment.

3. The integration method doesn’t have any bearing on clustering working or not working…

4. I’d need to know a lot more about what you’re doing here but we aren’t testing/supporting Unity running in a DataCenter configuration. We’re doing all our testing with Win2K server. Not saying it wont work, we just have no exposure to it yet and we aren’t planning on supporting it right out of the chute.

5. For 3.0 and later you will always need to run the third party fax server off our box. Fax installed onto the same server with Unity will no longer be supported at all.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[#3]

Thanks for your responses to a not-so-well-structured question. My clarifications and responses:

1,2 - So am I reading other posts correctly - to make this work "our way" we would need an Exchange 2K cluster with a one-way ADC to an Exchange 5.5 Unity box, copying the 5.5 stuff to 2000 but not vice versa?

4 - by a datacenter configuration, I mean that we have 20 regional offices across the country with UUnet internet connections over T1, DSL (mostly) and ISDN. Assuming we're running CallManager with the Survivable Remote Site stuff, would it make sense to put the Unity box in an Exodus-type datacenter (for availability and bandwidth reasons) instead of in our largest office, which has only a primary and backup T1? Has anyone implemented this kind of setup?

5 - I'm not sure what you mean by "you will always need to run the third party fax server off our box". Does "our box" mean an MCS box? And by third party I'm assuming you mean ActiveFax with a third-party board?

Thanks again for the thoughtful responses.

Nathan Carter
VP Technology
Teach For America
New York, NY

[#4]

Yeah, for 2.4.x you can only move directory data from Unity out to AD, but not back. If you want to field test 3.0 (which does support full AD integration), you can contact Brad Myers at bradm@cisco.com

I don’t know anything about “Exodus-type datacenters”, perhaps someone else out here does. I can assure you, however, we haven’t tested such a configuration here in Seattle.

What I mean by the fax server having to run off box is that you must run the fax server software on a server other than the Unity server. In previous versions of Unity we supported ActiveFax (a dumbed down version of Interstar’s LightningFax) running on our box in some limited configurations. That is no longer supported and ActiveFax is going away entirely in 3.0. 3rd party fax integrations (we have tested several here in house including RightFax, FaxSr, Faxination, etc…) are supported in 3.0 and later. These fax servers must run on their own hardware and can’t share space on the Unity server itself.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[Anil Verma]

I can answer Point #2 -
Unity will not work on a cluster. If you want your Exchange 2K servers to be redundant and have a hardware failover created, you will need to put Unity on a separate box, which is not in the cluster.