Would love to see Hyper-V/VMWare integration in the calc.

Very good work as usual! But two things I would like to see in the next version, as I know them from the HP Exchange 2010 Sizing Tool:

Free Choice how the Exchange Server Roles are combined on Servers in a DAG

Free choice for the user profile parameters.

tia

Bernd

E2010MAN - could you be more specific?  With regards to sizing Exchange on a VM or a physical machine, the basic tenets remain true - size the CPU, memory, disk, network regardless of virtual or physical.  

Ross

Bernd -

There is no specific HT/CAS sizing in this calculator - it is a mailbox sizing role calculator.  The multi-role question simply ensures that the mailbox CPU and memory is handled accordingly by having those other roles installed.

Also, we won't be providing custom message profile support as that is outside the scope of our IO prediction model (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832793.aspx for more information on how to size the database cache for the pre-defined profiles).   I'll have to follow up with HP and see what they are allowing.

Ross

Folks, I wanted to let you know of an issue in the v4.5 calc - if you are designing configurations to support multiple DAGs, there is an issue in the reporting of the number of processor cores you need for the various roles.  basically the calculator is making an assumption of only having a single DAG in the environment.  So you will need to multiply the processor cores per role by the number of DAGs you are deploying to see the full number of cores required.  This will be fixed in the next release.

Ross

When's the next release Ross? Is it any time soon?

Does anyone else have an issue with this spreadsheet that it does not populate any of the server core requirements?

I've tried in Excel 2010 and 2007 and both times it does not report the number of cores required for MBX, GC, HT or CAS

Justin - you need to populate the megacycle value per CPU core in the Input tab.

Ross

Trying to set the calculator up to run 2 Exchange servers in the primary site, with 2 DB copies (1 active and 1 passive) with 2 Exchange servers in the secondary site with 2 passive copies of the DB's.  I set the calculator up for HA = yes, Site Resil = yes, # of MB servers = 4 and copy of instanced deployed in the secondary data center = 2.

On the Role Requirements page I get a lot of the #DIV/0! errors.  Is anybody else seeing this or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks.. JS

John,

I probably have corrected this in the version I release shortly, but if you could send a copy of your configuration with the error to the email address listed in the calculator, I can verify.

Thanks, Ross

Ross,
  Thanks for such a quick response.  I have sent my version of the calculator to the email address.  Let me know if you dont get it.  Great tool and thanks again.

JS

Great tool Ross!

Some feedback: I am doing a sizing for a local DAG configuration made by 4 Mailbox Servers with 3 DB copies.

In the "Storage Design" sheet, I think the "Recommended Storage Architecture / Server" section shown the number of Disks required to support one copy of DBs. Right?

But then, bellow this number is multiplied by Number of Mailbox Servers, instead of number of DAG copies. So ion my case the "Total Number of Disk Required" is 4 times primary copy instead of just 3.

Hope this helps to improve the tool

Regards

Ivan,

Each server hosts a set of database copies.  For example, if you change to 4 servers with 3 copies and 12000 mailboxes (leaving all other defaults in the calculator), those 12000 mailboxes will be spread across 52 unique databases.  Thus, the DAG supports 156 database copies.  Those 156 database copies are spread across teh 4 servers such that each server hosts 39 copies.

Since we used all the defaults, the calculator highlights the JBOD architecture and thus you need 39 spindles since you have 39 copies.

39 * 4 servers = 156 copies.

Does that make sense?

Ross