[stevet]

I have a large enterprise SAN that hosts 3 MS Exchange 2K servers. I completed all of the design work for sizing/performance and it all went well. So, I know how many email users it can support based on the email users iops.

Problem is that now mangement is saying that there will be 3 BES servers attached to it (one BES per msx server). I need to find out how to predict the BES user impact on my Exchange servers/SAN. Does anyone have any hard data I could use for this? At the moment, it appears that I will be forced to build the SAN and then do sizing/performance testing on it before it goes into production. That is not the preferred method. I would rather be able to tell managment, that the SAN can host x number of users, instead of having to test it first, and then tell them the number after the testing is completed.

thanks,
Steve

[jrbes]

Everything I have seen shows that 3.6 BES users are a 3:1 ratio (act as three Exch users for every one account) and that 4.0 will be a 5:1 ratio.

P.S. We had our servers on SAN's and we experienced lengthy delays on our BES'. Once moved off the SAN's and to direct attached RAID0+1, delayes went away.

JR