Good afternoon -

I work in a medium sized firm with about 80 users.  We are on an Exchange 2003  active/passive (2) node cluster.

Right now, for the most part, everyone is in one mailbox store, within one storage group

We also have Anitgen installed on both nodes.

It seems like I'm always battling memory issues even though i have 4GB RAM installed and the 3GB switch configured.

Exchange 2007 64bit is gonna be nice!!

Anyway, my question is this..

 I'm thinking of taking advantage of the three other Storage Groups, creating a total of (4) Storage Groups each with 3 mailbox stores.

With each storage group running it's own ESE engine, is this going to improve performance or make it worse?

Hi,

   Multiple storage groups are a very good thing for recovery purposes. Consider that if it takes 4 hours to restore your current mailstore then your SLA has to be more than that time period as a minimum. Now consider if you cut users into logical groups and ended up with 4 seperate mail stores of approximately the same size. Restore times for 1 storage group would be approximately 1 hour rather than the previous 4. This also allows for more granular delegation of control if required.

 With regard to your "memory issues" creating more storage groups will use slightly more memory. Depening on what you consider to be a memory issue it's normal for the store process to consume all available memory. It releases unused memory back to the OS as it's needed. This helps exchange performance and gives good response to users.

Jerry