OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)

[Bryan O'Neal]

I can concur with a great deal of what your saying.  However I am intrigued
by your statement of "There are many other choices"  I am hoping to find
ones that work well for the very small business and the very large that
provide the same functionality of Exchange, but have not. Do you have a
solution suite that you can recommend?  As for the mail only portion, I can
tell you other systems handle it much better (Personally I like Postfix for
a pure mail solution).  The last time I looked at benchmarks was back in
2006 but I can not find them now.  Exchange was in the lower half of the
companied mail servers. But when you talk exchange mail is really less then
half of the conversation.  But again, as for cost, it is not as bad as you
think.  For small business solutions it can be quite cheep.  This cost
benefit ratio does degrade once you get into the very large enterprises and
you have to really look at how much you are willing to pay for what Exchange
does (and other solutions don't)  Similarly it is far to expensive for the
five person small business by its self.  Which is why it is bundled with SQL
Server, Share Point, Terminal Services, AD, and a ton of other stuff in
their Server 2003 Small Business Edition.  Still for most very small
businesses I encourage outsourcing all their IT needs.

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Bob
Elzer
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 12:00 PM
To: 'Main PLUG discussion list'
Subject: RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)

Exchange works and for now it probably has the best calendar app. But MS
designed it to only work with it's own relatives, It was not designed to
play nice with the rest of the kids on the block.

But the kids on the block, adjusted to play with MS.

When you are done adding up, all the things you need to run an exchange
server, it's just too costly, money and resources. 

There are so many other choices, that don't require all that special stuff,
and in some cases, they may take a little more effort to make them play with
MS, but in the end the money and resources are a lot less, and it works with
everybody.

Also when you talk about adding VM's, that solution works for everything,
not just exchange, so when comparing mail systems that shouldn't be
included.

One thing, I think that has been overlooked, and I don't know if it's ever
been done, is a mail server benchmark.

I'd be interested in knowing, the difference between the mail server, how
much disk space does the mail message take up when stored on the system, how
many messages can they handle per minute, how much load on the cpu do they
each take. I'm sure there are more question too.




-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Stephen
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 11:21 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)

I know the 2 bugaboos for excahnge in requirements is Disk IO for large
companies, (not as much an issue in a small sub 1000 users
company) and ram. exchange up to 2003 is a 4gb of ram beastie.

im not sure about the mailbox recovery, but i know it can run on ESXi vm as
long as you have 2 cores and 4gb of ram to give it. we are getting ready to
convert ours to a Virtual machine ill let ppl know the results if they want.

Also excahgne 2007  is fully 64 bit and VM supported as well. we are hoping
to deploy that and migrate soon

but for mailbox recovery im not sure what has changed but i know alot has.
but it is better than it has been in the past (comparing 5.5 to
2k3 personally)

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Bob Elzer <bob.elzer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well I haven't used the latest exchange and it's been a while, so 
> maybe you can tell me if they worked around the issues I had with it.
>
> It requires it's own server. On a single core server, it bogged the 
> system down so much, we couldn't run other apps. (granted it's 
> probably best to do that, but when you don't have the budget for it, 
> you have to do)
>
> There's no way to look at the raw email message on the server. Or go 
> through all the mail boxes.
>
> Recovery requires a second machine. From what I remember it was 
> convoluted, but you need a second box.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
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