So far in this chapter we've covered, at a conceptual level, the major components in Exchange Server 2010, how they interlink and depend on one another, and ways to provide resilience. Now that we understand more about Exchange Server, it's time to move onto getting practical, but before that we need to plan our installation.
Capacity planning is important for any environment as it gives you a chance to investigate what the load requirements are for your infrastructure before you let end users use the system. The last thing you want to do is purchase new server hardware, spend a great deal of time configuring your environment, and then find that it cannot be used by your end users because you didn't plan and test what you were going to do.
Because capacity planning is a vast subject, even just for Exchange, this book can't cover all the bases, such as if you are utilizing Virtualization and SAN storage, and we won't focus on capacity planning...