Soo did Microsoft shoot themselves in the foot with the Exchange 2019 requirements? CRAZY!

[computertechguy]

Microsoft Exchange 2016 required 16gb of ram for the mailbox roll, exchange 2019 requires 128gb min!!

Memory

Varies by Exchange server role: • Mailbox: 128 GB minimum recommended

 

[Sky-Knight]

No... because it's a bloody huge and active database that does a whole lot of stuff.

That and, if you've got an on prem Exchange, you've got money for real hardware. If you don't, you M365.

Note, yes it does run on far less. BUT your larger problem? The mail store has to live on an ReFS volume. And that is where the memory comes in, that's a database living inside a database!

Exchange installs on an NTFS volume, and the message store and transactions logs on the ReFS volume. That's TWO logical disks, minimum.

 

[Satman]

Aww, hell no.

 

[sapphirescales]

Microsoft Exchange 2016 required 16gb of ram for the mailbox roll, exchange 2019 requires 128gb min!!

Memory

Varies by Exchange server role: • Mailbox: 128 GB minimum recommended

Holy crap! This reminds me of the Windows Vista days. Each version of Windows required roughly 4x the RAM of its predecessor:

Windows 3.1: 1MB
Windows 95: 4MB
Windows 98: 16MB
Windows 2000/XP: 64MB

But then we got to Windows Vista and the requirements went from 64MB to a WHOPPING 1,024MB! Like, holy cow! Are you insane?! That's a 16x increase! Microsoft and manufacturers like Dell tried to lie and backpedaled saying that 512MB would be sufficient, but it wasn't and we got the "Windows Vista Capable" class action lawsuit. And realistically, 2,048MB is the minimum I'd recommend to run Windows Vista properly.

All I can do is hope that Microsoft learned their lesson from that fiasco and the REAL requirement for Exchange 2019 isn't actually 256GB.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

WinXP towards the end we were doing 1 gig as minimum standard, 2 gigs for power users.
Most of the biz world skipped Vista...but we did 4 gigs when it came out.
Win7 started seeing 8 gigs as the standard for us

Anyways, Exchange does "a lot now"...it's not just plain text emails in there anymore. With all the collaboration of various apps, a lot lives in Exchange database. Huge changes in how it caches to make things quicker, and indexing service now lives inside of the database, Garbage collection now happens on the server side, not workstation.

RAM is cheap these days. Small Business Server is long dead. If you had a client large enough for on prem Exchange server years ago, heck we were doing at least 32 or 64 gigs back then with Exchange 13. Maybe 16 gigs for a small client, if virtualized.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Heck I have 64gb in the Dell behind me that runs all my junk, and I'm a one man shop.

So yeah, RAM is indeed cheap.

 

[SAFCasper]

Lets be honest, Microsoft design exchange to be optimised for their own servers powering Exchange Online and we just get what is passed down.

2019 can be run on less memory though. I have a client running on 64GB with absolutely no issues.

 

[sapphirescales]

WinXP towards the end we were doing 1 gig as minimum standard, 2 gigs for power users.

I personally ran XP SP3 on an old Micron laptop with 233Mhz PII and 64MB of RAM. The thing was slow of course, but it worked fine. I couldn't run the full version of Photoshop CS2 so I downloaded a lite version from a torrent website. Ah, the joys of being poor. This was about 2003 I believe, and I was 12 years old. EDIT: I couldn't have Photoshop and Word 2003 open at the same time though.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah my first install of XP (from MS Action Pack) was on a very early PII ...I think a 266 I was overlocking to 3something...
)...with 96 megs. Yup...slow.

 

[sapphirescales]

Yeah my first install of XP (from MS Action Pack) was on a very early PII ...I think a 266 I was overlocking to 3something...
)...with 96 megs. Yup...slow.

I don't miss the days when computers being slow was "normal," but I feel like I was more patient/had better impulse control back then. I remember when it was normal for Photoshop to take up to a minute to load and if your computer booted in less than 2-3 minutes it was considered "fast." I do remember that when stuff finally did load it was a lot more satisfying. The whole world felt slower/more relaxed back then. Maybe it's just me.