Microsoft & HP already have sizing tools for Exchange 2010 apart from other guidance. I was happy to come across another tool, this time by Dell, called Exchange 2010 Advisor.

This tool is available online and takes you through a set of questions before giving you the final guidance. To start with the tool’s focus is on providing Advisory Services for the following areas:

• RPO/RTO
• Acquisition Cost
• Power Efficiency
• Total Solution footprint in the data center
• Performance 

As with other tools, as per Microsoft guidelines they ask you about the No of Mailbox in every tier (3) and let you select User Profiles for each tier (Light/Medium/Heavy/Very heavy). The question on Personal Archives is something I was not too happy about 5GB is what they have kept as a hard limit. So you go through 15 set of questions and finally arrive at the Solution, that takes sometime…! You can download it as a PDF too. I was a bit surprised at the proposals - I kept 20 users each for every Tier (so in all 60 users) and kept 0 for nothing for Personal Archives - wow Symantec Enterprise Vault was the only Archiving Solution recommended…hmmm….partners only?

Well, not a bad start….

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