Ean Kingston wrote:
On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 08:06, Christian Tischler wrote:
Hi, I would like to run an MS exchange server. But I am not at all willing to set up an MS box at all. As I know I could run something like VMware virtual server or Wine, but I do not know if such an combination would be stable (sopken in terms of windows stability). The next consideration would be the performance of the overal setup.
Any hints or suggenstions would be great.
As someone who has inhereted an Exchange server I have a few hints for you.
1 Run Exchange on a Dedicated Windows Server (2000 or 2003). Do not fiddle with VMware or Wine. You are going to need a license for Windows to run Exchange under VMware (or bochs). You are probably going to need a license of Windows to run it under wine (if that is even possible). In any case, you will lose stability if you don't dedicate a system to Windows.
2 You need to keep the disk where Exchange stores its mail database at least 55% free or Exchange will not work properly. This is because you need to periodically rebuild the Exchange database to keep performance tollerable. Also when mail is deleted in an exchange mail store, it is not actually deleted but just marked for deletion. You need to take the mail store offline (so nobody can access their mailbox) periodically and run a tool to purge the deleted items. This takes hours on any decent sized mail system. When this happens it creates temporary files roughly 110% the size of the mail store.
[etc.]
As someone who used to administer and Exchange Server, I agree. It is a serious pain, and requires constant handholding.
I know someone who _loves_ Scalix (http://www.scalix.com). It's an Exchange replacement that runs on Linux (and maybe FreeBSD), but that's all I know about it. If you need to support Outlook clients, it might work for you, and it's probably cheaper than Exchange.
- Bob
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