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Configuration
7 Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series and Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 | 3925-BP-EX
2 Configuration
2.1 Disk layout
Microsoft provides the following storage configuration best practices for Exchange 2016 in the TechNet blog,
The Exchange 2016 Preferred Architecture.
RAID is often used to both improve the performance characteristics of individual disks (by striping data across
several disks) as well as to provide protection from individual disk failures. With the advancements in
Exchange 2016 high availability, RAID is not a required component for Exchange 2016 storage design.
However, RAID is still an essential component of Exchange 2016 storage design for standalone servers as
well as solutions that require storage fault tolerance.
Determining the storage layout before the installation of Microsoft Exchange Server is an important step
because it can have direct impact on performance when using other disk solutions.
With Exchange Server 2016, due to the reduced IOPS required, Microsoft allows placement of logs and
databases on the same volume for DAG-protected databases. The Jet database (EDB) activity resembles
sequential reading and writing to 32 KB blocks. The transaction logs see 100 percent sequential reads and
writes.
Table 1 shows a sample disk layout based on best practices.
Sample disk layout
Drive
Recommended configuration
Contents
C:
DAS/SAN
Windows, Exchange binaries
D:
DAS/SAN
Pagefile
E:
SAN
Database 1 and Logs 1
F:
SAN
Database 2 and Logs 2
When using Exchange Server 2016 DAGs to create a highly resilient database infrastructure, Microsoft
preferred-architecture guidance discusses distributing three copies plus a lagged copy across DAG members,
and utilizing the same drive location on each of four servers to host an active copy, as well as two passive
copies and a lagged copy of each of the four server's databases.
1
Microsoft design guidance is specifically for
JBOD (non-SAN) environments where larger, slower single drives are used to provide storage for Exchange
databases. Therefore, this Microsoft guidance may not apply for ME Series SAN volumes. This is due to the
following reasons:
• ME4 Series arrays support a combination of HDD and SSD drives. This can improve performance by
using a mix of SSD and HDD drives and tiering data.
• ME4 Series arrays support a large number of RAID configurations for flexibility to help choose a
balance between redundancy and utilization efficiency. The number of drives required can be greatly
reduced when using a more efficient RAID technology such as ADAPT RAID.
• Because each volume can be striped across multiple drives in a pool, a single volume can greatly
exceed the performance and capacity of a single drive. Therefore, multiple databases can be created
on a single volume, which can simplify management.