Designing a Microsoft Exchange environment requires significant study and planning, ranging from Microsoft Active Directory service design to disk group configurations. When planning the storage strategy for Exchange, administrators typically should consider four criteria:

• Performance
• Availability
• Recovery
• Capacity

These factors affect the cost, architecture, maintenance, and disaster recovery of an Exchange environment. This best practices brief presents sample configurations and outlines some basic setup considerations. This document is not intended to be an installation and configuration guide for Microsoft Exchange Server, but rather a starting point to tune and optimize the storage system within the Exchange environment.