Paul Schnackenburg

Hi Daniel, yes it does indeed seem so. Shame – I thought it was useful.

Hi Clive,
I hear your frustration and I’m sorry that you’re caught up in Microsoft’s focus on the cloud and neglect of on-premises products. I didn’t know about the rebuilding of the search index not working, very poor showing from Microsoft.
/Paul

Hi Jack,

There's no tie in to DAGs specifically BUT the Preferred Architecture assumes that you're using clusters and DAGs (after all, you don't want a single failed server to bring down your entire Exchange environment). 

I'm not really sure what the NVMe disk will give you in this scenario, as mentioned, Microsoft assumes individual (non-RAID) HDDs for storage of your mailbox databases and the SSD for caching is "icing on the cake". 

Or put another way – are you or your users seeing degraded performance today? You've got some sweet SSDs there – they'll be LOT faster than HDDs. 

Hope that helps,

Paul

Hi Jack,

Glad you liked the article.
It depends, not so much on the size of the databases, but on the number of physical HDDs that underlies them. How many drives do you have? Are they just plain drives (not RAID) as the Preferred Architecture specifies?
The recommendation is one SSD per three HDDs so that’ll be your design point.
Having said that, I don’t know whether you’d get better performance if you just introduced a single SSD, I don’t have a system of your size to test that.
Let us know about the number of drives,

Paul

Hi William, 

Thanks for the feedback, which I agree with. 

Many small and medium businesses won't look beyond a built in capability like this and for a small investment in effort they'll increase their security a great deal. But yes, if you're a large enterprise or you need very specific security functionality there are third party services available. 

Cheers,

Paul

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the kind words and I'm very glad to hear that it worked out for your org. It really makes sense but it always takes time to change "best practise truths" that have been around for a long time. 

Hi Allan, 
Interesting observation, I think it depends on what's happening at the time. If I'm presenting and conveying theory information, yes I agree with you. But there are many times in modern learning when it's less about "the lecture" and more about facilitating exploration and learning by the students themselves. And certainly in this part of a learning experience (in a physical classroom) I do want the learners to interact amongst themselves, many times students have experience and skills to contribute to the overall learning and I'd like to replicate that experience in a virtual classroom. 

Hope that makes sense,

Paul

Hi Ron,
Thanks for your feedback – I was expecting some comments on this piece and you really didn't disappoint. 

I agree with your points regarding the issues around Microsoft's Windows 10 releases, although I would point out that more recent releases have had improved quality and less issues. I think Microsoft does work hard to learn from their mistakes. 

As for using the same approach internally in a business I can understand your concerns. I would mention that you don't have to take every Windows 10 release, especially if you're on the fall releases you can stick with it for up to 30 months, which would give you longer to do more comprehensive testing of all business applications. For what it's worth I upgrade my client's Windows 10 installations every 12 months, with some testing of their most important applications but not comprehensive testing of every app, but then again I work in SMB and not enterprises. 

And finally, I do agree that Microsoft's decision to get rid of their testers in hindsight probably wasn't the best decision they could have made. 

Overall though I do think there needs to be a balance between the IT department's desktop management approach from 10-20 years ago (what I call the "Stalin school of IT") which is very regimented, very locked down and providing no flexibility for end users and the YOLO world of upgrading to every new release with no testing at all. Somewhere in-between (and it'll be different for every business) is where I think a modern IT department needs to be to help the business be more effective with their IT infrastructure investments. 

Just my two cents 🙂

Wow, a celebrity (Cameron Fuller) is commenting on my nine year old article :-). This is a good day for me. Anyway I agree – no serial No gathered.