Exchange 2010 versus 2007

As a senior consultant with Statera I go out on sales calls and work with clients wanting to upgrade their messaging environment. Lately I have had to explain the difference and reasoning about going to Exchange 2010. Several prospective or current clients want to know why they should go to a relatively new technology in Exchange 2010 instead of Exchange 2007. I usually give the same speech and figured I would give the high points in this post:

1. DAG's (Database Availability Groups) this is probably the most compelling reason to go directly to 2010. DAG's offer the most straight forward and easiest way to invoke both High Availability and Disaster Recovery. DAG's combine and enhance the various replication options from Exchange 2007 (LCR, CCR, SCC and SCR) into a standard, easily administrated solution. Exchange 2010 removes Storage Groups from the Exchange vernacular and puts the Database as the main storage hierarchy. Another benefit of DAGs versus Mailbox clustering in Exchange 2oo7 is that now instead of a active passive scenario, you can now have an active active scenario with each node having active databases and cop0y databases; this allows for better utilization of server hardware.
2. Server reduction: Exchange 2010 allows an organization to placed the HUB and CAS roles on a server that is participating on a Mailbox DAG. Previously in Exchange 2007 if you had a clustered Mailbox server you could not place any other roles on the clustered servers. Exchange 2010 can reduce a simple high availability design for an organization from four server to two. In Exchange 2007 you would need to have two dedicated servers for a mailbox cluster and then another two servers to host the HUB and CAS roles. In Exchange 2010 you can have the same redundancy with only two servers, each one hosting the Mailbox, HUB and CAS roles.

There are also other benefits of Exchange 2010 is the reduction is IOPS for the databases has been calculated as much as 70% compared to Exchange 2007. Since the path to go from Exchange 200X to Exchange 2010 is the same, a company looking to move either to Exchange 2007 or 2010 is a big decision. If the company decides to go with 2007 a complete migration will require another complete migration in the future to migrate to 2010. My recommendation is to forgo the next migration and go directly to 2010. While 2010 supports installation on Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2007 does not. These two factors highlight that going directly to Exchange 2010 and Server 20087 R2 will result in a company being in a supported state from Microsoft for a longer duration than going with Exchange 2007 on Server 2008.

I do understand that some companies still are hesitant to run on the "Bleeding Edge" of technology. My answer to this is that Exchange 2010 is more of an R2 version of Exchange 2007 than a complete redesign of the Exchange platform as Exchange 2007 was compared to Exchange 2000/2003.

If you are contemplating this move please take the above information into effect and please do not hesitate to contact me at Sean dot McNeill at Statera dot com for more information.