Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
126 Posts
0
1407
Exchange 2010 Fast and Fast VP to do or not to do
Community,
I have seen white papers that address the use of Fast with Exchange 2010. I would like to get your feed back on this issue. Is using FAST or FAST VP beneficial with Exchange 2010. Do you have any customers that tried to use this and how is it working for them? Is this a feature we should look more into when we are doing a Exchange sizing for our customers? Let the discussion begin.
sbillas
13 Posts
0
April 27th, 2012 01:00
I have a customer that basically runs everything in on pool with FAST VP on it, and three tiers. We ended up locking the Exchange 2010 on "lowest tier" at it was consuming the top tiers without "need" for it. I think the maintenance jobs in Exchange was running too close the the FAST relocation and therefore got weighted too high. But with the Exchanged locked on lowers tier everything runs good. So Exchange wise, it ran good on SSDs but not the other applications in the pool as Exchange hogged resources without the need for it.
I guess this is the main reason why we don't like putting Exchange in FAST enabled pools. BUT if we create a pool only for Exchange and then run FAST VP on it, now that is another discussion and perhaps the one you where looking for?
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
•
274.2K Posts
0
April 27th, 2012 02:00
I've not personally met any customers that have mailbox requirements warranting SSD like performance. At best when asked to balance performance where required along with capacity a single pool with very few SAS drives and more NL-SAS meets the needs along with costs.
A good article that address's storage requirments which I often share with customers is this.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832792.aspx
Great debate though guys and it would be good to hear others views on this.
LouisLu
161 Posts
0
April 27th, 2012 02:00
We can image how intensive workload BDM brings (~3x bandwidth increased). It also featured with large sequential I/O size - 256KB I/O reads. From this side,BDM seems not beneficial from SSDs. But benefits of FAST also includes cost saving from good tiering(high performance/less-expensive), optimizing and prioritizing business applications(allowing customers to dynamically allocate) and etc. So you can still have benefits maximized from FAST. Maybe you need better FAST policies at the same time.
Look forward to experienced sharings.
duckew
126 Posts
0
April 27th, 2012 05:00
Nice discussion. Overall what I am hearing is Tiering is not a real good fit for Exchange most of the exchange workload can be handled on lower tiers (NL-SAS or Sata) drives.Not saying you cant use it if you already have it in your system and want to add exchange. I would keep it to the lower tiers to prevent unnecessary use of the high tier.