danielu©âzwb±Ë¬²*²hœ®‹(~×(

Hi...

I'm designing a FE/BE Exchange 2000 Architecture with a DMZ and I'm worried
that the FE machine might be the bottleneck in the system. I'm thinking of
making the FE machine a (P11 500 MHZ 384 SDRAM IDE HD) and the BE a (P111 768
SDRAM with SCSI 29160 Adaptec controler 10,000 RPM drive). Of coarse I can
reverse the hardware and use the faster machine up front.

I'm only starting out with a handfull of users but I hope to expand.

I'm thinking the FE Machine might crap out when dealing with multiple people
using OWA while having to decrypte SSL and authenticate as well.

Is it right to assume that the FE mahcine with its IDE drive will not get
much action and will pass all disk I/O requests to the more powerfull BE
machine ?

Any recomendations would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks,

Dan

brian desmond [mvp]

Hello Dan,

Can you describe your users in a bit more detail? How many are there? How
active are they on Outlook, OWA?

In gneeral I think both of those machines are severely under spec'ed, the
front end in particular, but with a small handful of users you would
probably be ok.

--
--
Brian Desmond
Windows Server MVP
desmondb@payton.cps.k12.il.us

Http://www.briandesmond.com

danielu©âzwb±Ë¬²*²hœ®‹(~×(

Thanks for your reply Brian...

As of now... I will have three Pop3 checking email and two using OWA but
that could change to 5-6 using OWA pretty soon.

I imagine the Pop 3 would be daily, the OWA weekly...

What Hardware do you recomend for my situation?

al mulnick

I have to disagree with the assessment about the servers. We don't have
enough information about your overall goals. FE servers generally can scale
into the 10's of thousands pretty well depending on the protocol. The real
bottleneck occurs in the BE server generally.

FWIW, don't install the FE in the DMZ. Putting a domain member in the DMZ
is a bad idea IMHO. Use ISA or similar to publish your FE server. It will
also off-load the SSL encryption for you. If you're wondering about the
impact of SSL, it's usually expected that it may add up to 20 or 30% proc
overhead if not using a TOE card or similar.

For 5-6 people I can usually run that off a laptop or a PDA device without
noticeable performance degradation (I'm exaggerating about one of those, but
only a little

BE performance often suffers from disk contention long before processor
becomes an issue for straight Exchange.

What's the expected peak load of the servers? What's the expected
throughput (mail, users, etc)?

Those kinds of details would be useful to know.

al

brian desmond [mvp]

Yeah for 5 or 6 users I disagree with my assesment too. THe FE should be
fine - just plan on spending a while waiting for Windows to start, loading
it, that sort of stuff.

BE, given mostly OWA & POP3 traffic I wouldn't worry too much.

--
--
Brian Desmond
Windows Server MVP
desmondb@payton.cps.k12.il.us

Http://www.briandesmond.com