Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed

Planning for the Mailbox Server Role

The mailbox server role is the central role in an Exchange topology, as it is the server that stores the actual mailboxes of the user. Subsequently, mailbox servers are often the most critical for an organization, and are given the most attention.

With the Enterprise version of Exchange, a mailbox server can hold anywhere from 1 to 100 databases on it. Each of the databases are theoretically unlimited in size, although it is wise to keep an individual database limited to 100GB or less for performance and recovery scenarios.

Note

In large organizations, a single server or a set of servers is often dedicated to individual server roles. That said, a single server can also be assigned other roles, such as the ...