Summary

Scaling upward and outward is a necessary evil for organizations with more than a few hundred users. While a single machine can easily support all the necessary server roles for a few hundred mailboxes, if it is not properly configured, it may experience performance problems. Recognizing potential performance bottleneck points and how to correct them is an essential skill for Exchange administrators.

As more mailboxes are supported on a single Exchange Mailbox server, scaling the server upward to support more storage is also an important configuration item. Creating more storage groups and mailbox databases will help you to support larger mailboxes and more data while preventing any single database from growing too large.

Local continuous replication is a new feature of Exchange 2007 that also allows you to grow and scale your organization. This feature allows you to support larger mailboxes but still have low recoverability times for mailbox databases. By allowing important mailbox databases (or all mailbox databases) to be configured to use LCR, you can have a nearly perfectly synchronized copy of the production database that can be swapped in to production in a moment's notice.