Yesterday, Microsoft’s CXP team (Customer Experience Team) released a lengthy blog post containing practical information towards sizing of Exchange 2013. A moment we all have been waiting for since the product was released in October of last year.

With this new information, it will finally become possible to create a decenter design and migration approach.

Unfortunately, there’s still no trace of the Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator which is – let’s face it – the reference tool when properly sizing an Exchange Server environment. The only mention in the article states that it’s coming somewhere later this quarter. Looks like we’re going to have to be a little more patient, don’t we?

Nonetheless, with the information from the article, you should be set on your way as it contains all the information you need to properly size a new Exchange 2013 Server environment. Please do keep in mind that this is Microsoft’s first guidance on this topic and is likely to change over time as customers and also Microsoft gain more experience with the product in more real-life deployments.

Over the course of the next weeks, I hope to provide you with some comparative figures between Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013, but for now it looks like Exchange 2013 is quite hungry on Memory and CPU. However, from an architecture point-of-view, it’s not all that surprising. After all, memory and CPU are relatively cheap these days.

Stay tuned for more info!

To read the original article containing the different calculations, have a look at the following article:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/05/06/ask-the-perf-guy-sizing-exchange-2013-deployments.aspx