Will the Real Exchange 2007 Database Size Please Stand Up
Looks like there's some confusion a'brewin' about the true maximum size associated with Exchange 2007 Standard Edition and its databases.
According to an article at msexchange.org:
“Exchange Server 2007 comes in two flavors, a standard edition and an enterprise edition, just like previous versions of Exchange. The Mailbox Server when talking about the Exchange Server 2007 Standard edition supports a total of 5 Storage Groups and 5 databases. Unlike Exchange 2003 and previous versions of Exchange there’s no longer a database storage limit in the standard edition. The Mailbox server in the Exchange 2007 Enterprise edition supports up to 50 Storage groups and a maximum of 50 databases per server. Exchange 2007 allows you to create up to 5 databases in each Storage Group as is the case with Exchange 2003, but best practice is to create 1 database per Storage Group.”
But, from page 6 of the Exchange Server 2007 Administrator's Pocket Consultant, the word is...
...(paraphrasing here) Exchange 2007 Standard edition is limited to 10 storage groups and a maximum of 5 databases per storage group. One of those SG’s is reserved for the “Recovery Storage Group”. The limit on mailbox database size is 16G per database.
Well, according to some research some guys at my consulting firm did last week, the only way to get the "unlimited database size" is with a registry key.
Harold Wong talks about the discrepency in his blog:
In Exchange Server 2007, we made some major changes to the Standard Edition of the product as it relates to the database support. Just a little history first ... In Exchange Server 2003, Standard Edition supported 2 Databases in 1 Storage Group (1 Mailbox Database and 1 Public Folder Database). The size limitation was 16 GB for each prior to SP2. With the advent of Exchange Server 2003 SP2, the Standard Edition Database size was increased to 75 GB. Upon installing SP2, the Database size actually increased to 18 GB by default. Exchange Administrators had to edit a registry as defined in this article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6c4ce7bb-5289-4221-a87c-b9c78ab7c09c.aspx.
With the introduction of Exchange Server 2007, we made some changes to the Standard Edition so that we now support up to 5 Databases and up to 5 Storage Groups with Standard Edition. Each of these Databases has a size limit of 16 TB (considered "unlimited" for all intense and purposes). This is great news, right?? I think so as do quite a few of our customers.So why am I writing this post??? It would seem that the default installation of Exchange Server 2007 Standard Edition does not immediately start off with this "unlimited" size. It actually has a default limit of 50 GB per Database. The Exchange Administrator would still need to edit the registry as defined in the same article I referenced for Exchange Server 2003 (here it is again just to be safe: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6c4ce7bb-5289-4221-a87c-b9c78ab7c09c.aspx).
You can read Harold's blog here.
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