system requirements

Hopefully have a easy question...

We just purchased a new server with Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007. We have
about 100 mailboxes. When I look in the task manager I see that all my
memory is allocation is full. The exchange store is taking up about 2.7
GB...which seems to be way to high. Let me first tell you that this server
is in a test lab. The real server's exchange store is running just under a
gig. This server is a win 2000 w/ exchange 2000 btw. When I looked all over
the internet I saw that 4GB would be plenty of RAM for just 100 mailboxes.
Can anyone tell me why it would be so high or is there something I can do to
get the available RAM down? Or did I just receive the wrong information and
need to upgrade to 8GB. We are not wanting to upgrade because of the cost
but this needs to be resolved. TIA!

Daniel

 

Dan,
This is by design. Windows 2008 (and other versions) will consume all the
memory they can. Exchange is basically a database and it will try to use as
much memory as is available. Unused memory is, well, useless so that's why
it works this way. But don't worry, as soon as another process needs memory
it will be alocated it's share.
As far as your 4GB is concerned, IMO it is enough for 100 users. However, I
hope you are not using this server for other roles (DC, FileShare, SQL
Server etc), like in the Small Business Server scenario. OTOH, memory is
cheap these days and upgrading to 8GB should not be a problem.



"Dan" <Dan@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:E13EA8F1-B461-42F4-8DF5-1AA9220571AC@microsoft.com...
> Hopefully have a easy question...
>
> We just purchased a new server with Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007. We
> have
> about 100 mailboxes. When I look in the task manager I see that all my
> memory is allocation is full. The exchange store is taking up about 2.7
> GB...which seems to be way to high. Let me first tell you that this
> server
> is in a test lab. The real server's exchange store is running just under
> a
> gig. This server is a win 2000 w/ exchange 2000 btw. When I looked all
> over
> the internet I saw that 4GB would be plenty of RAM for just 100 mailboxes.
> Can anyone tell me why it would be so high or is there something I can do
> to
> get the available RAM down? Or did I just receive the wrong information
> and
> need to upgrade to 8GB. We are not wanting to upgrade because of the cost
> but this needs to be resolved. TIA!
>
> Daniel