Post3: Migrating to Exchange – One Domino Admin’s tell all journey
This meeting took place on January 23rd, 2009 and I’m just getting to editing it so that it can be published.
These are meeting notes and general factoids that I jotted down. This was taken from a planning meeting with the Microsoft Senior Technical Account Manager who is handling the project for us and the Senior technical Engineer who is planning the environment.
The Microsoft Senior Technical Account Manager told me that quote:
Exchange has 60% of the email market worldwide.
20% lotus notes
10% Linux or “something”
The overall Active directory presentation and design was pretty good. It makes sense and the MS guys seemed knowledgeable and understood what we wanted and I felt like when they said they could accomodate what we want that they meant it.
Currently, we have 2 clustered Domino mail servers in 17 sites.
3 Blackberry servers in hub locations.
1 Pair of clustered hub servers (outbound SMTP gateways)
1 pair of clustered inbound SMTP gateway servers.
TOTAL: 41 Domino servers
MS Exchange design:
10 sites will have (2 MBX (CCR) + 2 CAS/HUB + 2 ISA)
4 hub2 sites will have (2 MBX (CCR) + 2 CAS/HUB + 2 ISA + 2 Edge)
TOTAL: 92 Exchange and server that Exchange relies on (Email only)
To be fair I wont’ include Office Communications Server or Facetime since we currently have no internal instant messaging solution. But here’s the data below.
Office Communication Server (OCS) requires 8 servers for one hub site (IM and presence awareness only)
2 Access Edge servers
2 Reverse Proxy
2 Back End SQL Servers (one ODCS DB and the other archiving)
2 Front End Servers
Access/reverse proxy servers must be hardware load balanced because windows load balancing will not work for OCS.
Facetime will require 4 servers (1 IMA active server for OCS) and (1 ImA Server for PIM) each has a “cold standby server”
Requires a SQL database (can be the SQL cluster used by OCS)
I can see first off that we are going to require alot more servers, and secondly, we are going to have to upgrade our bandwidth in many areas.
This is because all IM traffic will go through HK, Outlook Web Access will go through HK, OCS traffic will all be on HK server (text/awareness only). Additionally, Symantec Enterprise Vault will generate traffic when it performs a nightly archive from mailboxes to EV machine in hub sites. Exchange journaling will occur to HK for every message instantly.
5 Responses to “Post3: Migrating to Exchange – One Domino Admin’s tell all journey”
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Looks like this is going to cost a lot going from an email system that uses and address and rich text area to send mail to a system that uses an address and rich text area… deja vu… lol.. Companies that do these changes must not have to answer to the board. Would be nice to see a value analysis… What if Notes was kept.. what would the cost be over 5 years. On the change what is the cost expected to be.? If only mail not a big deal, if applications also, well then you’ll still have to pay for notes for some time. Has anyone put together these costs, or are they just ignoring them. If I were a stockholder in your company I would be pissed.
I’m curious where the company sees the value here? More than doubling your server count and that’s for email only. What about apps, blackberry, etc?
A cost analysis would be nice to see.
Also curious, what is the business reason for making the switch? In all my years, I’ve never really heard a valid one yet.
Interesting post. This would be by itself a great argument when considering migrations to MS.
The difference in the number of servers (= systems to manage) usually brings in a huge increase in the cost of ownership.
I’m looking for more updates, I think many can learn from your experience.
Thanks for posting.
Don’t forget to add some drives too. Disk space usage will go through the roof once you switch.
100% more servers for Exchange is a pretty normal when you are talking about clustering.
I agree with John, in these economic times one has to wonder about the cost to get what you already have. Doh!
Wow, just wow! More than twice the hardware, just to get the same level of service, and if you replacd the Existing Domino servers with the hardware you are going to have to buy for the Exchanged servers you could probably add Sametime without increasing the total number of servers.
In addition to bandwidth, I hope you have rack space and power for all that new hardware!