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I must have been asleep during Ross Smith IV’s Technical Keynote at the Microsoft Exchange Conference when the topic was apparently covered, but I certainly wasn’t asleep when Greg Taylor mentioned the fact that Exchange 2013 Enterprise Edition reduces the number of databases that can be mounted on a mailbox server from 100 to 50. Exchange 2013 Standard Edition maintains its ability to mount up to five databases.Cutting the number of mountable databases in half is clearly a pretty fundamental change that will affect the way in which some organizations have deployed Database Availability Groups (DAGs). For example, if you depend on mounting 60 or 70 databases on each DAG member in order to have three or four copies of each database, then your plans will have to change for Exchange 2013.But why has Microsoft taken such a step? On the surface, it would seem that this hamstrings the DAG a tad, but when you poke at the topic further you find that some reasonable logic has driven the decision.Although they share many aspects of the product architecture, Exchange 2013 is different to Exchange 2010. Take search for instance. Exchange 2010 uses the MSSearch component to create the content indexes of mailbox databases. Exchange 2013 uses the Search Foundation instead in order to share a common search infrastructure with other products, SharePoint being the most important because of the need to provide discovery searches across email and documents.

byITPro Today