Exchange 2016 Preferred Architecture JBOD Definition

Question

In the Exchange 2016 preferred architecture recommendations put out by Microsoft. The recommendation is for JBOD storage for information stores. I understand the basis of the recommendation and the semantics of recovery etc. but I am trying to get clarification on Microsoft's definition of JBOD.

In the RAID controller world, JBOD can be defined as a bunch of disks bundled together and displayed as one drive. ie: no RAID level, concatenated to make one large volume.

I am assuming that Microsoft's definition is displaying each individual disk to the OS as an individual volume.

Thoughts please...

Microsoft's - The Preferred Architecture

Answer 1

Your article references Exchange 2013 while you are asking for Exchange 2016. So please check "The Exchange 2016 Preferred Architecture" here.

Anyway: Important is now that Microsoft preferred ReFS. There is also an autoseed function as mentioned in the 2016 article which is both not covered in the 2013 article as both isn´t available in Exchange 2013.

So the MS prefered architecture is to use Raid 1 for the operating system, Exchange binaries, protocol/client logs, and transport database. The JBOD disks should be formated with ReFS for the mailDBs.

And yes Microsoft preferred to use multiple different disks as written in there article via Each disk that houses an Exchange database is formatted with ReFS (with the integrity feature disabled). This is mostly due to the reason that you can place then different DBs with different requirements on different disks (also so spread the workload). This is mentioned in the Microsoft article as To ensure that the capacity and IO of each disk is used as efficiently as possible, four database copies are deployed per-disk.