On 2012-03-01 8:38 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
Get yourself a qualified network architect. Pay for a full network traffic analysis. He'll attach sniffers at multiple points in your network to gather traffic/error/etc data. Then you'll discuss the new office, which employees/types with move there, and you'll be able to know almost precisely the average and peak bandwidth needs over the MAN link. He'll very likely tell you the same thing I have, that a single gigabit MAN link is plenty. If you hire him to do the work, he'll program the proper QOS setup to match the traffic patterns gleaned from the sniffers.
Finally had time to properly review your answers here Stan.
The time you took for the in-depth reply is very much appreciated - and I'm sure you got a kick out of the level of my ignorance... ;)
As for hiring a network architect, I will absolutely be doing as you recommend (was already planning on it), but with the information I'm now armed with, at least I'll have a better chance of knowing if they know what they are doing/talking about...
I'm still planning for the two physical servers (one at each location), but you have convinced me that trying to run two live mail systems is an unnecessary and even unwanted level of complexity. The DC VM will still be hot (it is always best to have two DCs in a windows domain environment anyway) so I'll get automatic real time off site backup of all of the users data (since it will all be on DFS), but for the mail services, I'll just designate one as live, and one as the hot/standby that is kept in sync using dsync. This way I'll automatically get off site back up for each site for the users data stored in the DFS, and have a second mail system ready to go if something happens to the primary.
Again, thanks Stan... I am constantly amazed at the level of expertise and quality of advice available *for free* in the open source world, as is available on these lists.
--
Best regards,
Charles