Ping Exchange 2010 implementers

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Hi all. I was just wondering who here has implemented Exchange 2010 and what do you think of it?

We currently have 2007 which we want to move to another server (most likely Server 2008, up from 2003) and someone has just suggested going to 2010. We are also slowly moving to Windows 7 and with the current crop of pc's we get upgrades from office 2007 to 2010 with them so eventually we will also have office 2010 too.

Is it stable?
Are the benefits of upgrading from 2007 worth it?
How is it on resources?

Thanks

Edit: I forgot to mention that this is also a part of the migration to a new exchange server problem I posted about a while ago. After mentioning a few things to them the management agreed that a new certificate and a new server name might not be a bad idea.

 

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We're in the midst of looking into upgrading our exchange 2003 to 2010 and would also be interested in peoples opinions.

 

We've moved from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 so not sure about the benefits of moving from 2007.

So far it's been very stable and reliable. For us the improvement is great but I belive it's partially because old server was all-in-one config (File/Print, AD, Exchange, etc.) with 3GB of RAM and we moved to 2 host cluster with 32GB each and Exchange got it's own 8GB to run on.

From the management point of view I don't think it's much different from Exchange 2007.
A lot of the new fancy features in Exchange 2010 require Enterprise CAL licenses so keep that in mind.

Archiving is not worth it IMHO (at least until SP1 is released), because you can't specify which database the archive mailbox sits on and you will need Outlook 2010 clients to utilise it.

It's a lot better on disk I/O than 2003 and 2007 versions. Needs a lot of RAM to run smoothly (8 minimum).


Not sure what you want to know, so if you have any specific questions, fire away.

 

2 more things:

DAG - great if you use it. (How could I forget that?)

OWA is a lot better than 2007 and compatible with other browsers (than IE)

 

There isn't a massive benefit from 2007 currently in my opinion. SP1 will offer some new additions but it's going to take some stuff away as well. I'll jot some of the main things that I've found good/bad down below.

Role based authentication offers some additional options to break up administration and giving users admin access via the web console but I've seen very few companies implement this.

Personal archives can only be created on the DB that the user is currently a member of. SP1 will allow you disparate mailboxes and archives and you can create a single Archive DB that you can move to separate storage.

I'm not a fan currently of retention polices based on message classification but Microsoft is pushing this as they're removing console access to managed folders which I prefer.

If you're using high availability then DAG is the new option and it's pretty easy to setup, you still need enterprise server licenses for windows server and you still need to separate out the CAS roles for NLB if you want true access high availability.