Hardware

You definetly need more RAM. check perfomance monitor or the task manager performance window.Ill bet you'll see proc usage at about 40% and most if not all your ram in use.

It really depends on this: Will they play well together (the database and exchange)? Test to the two apps together before you install them both in functionality and performance. If you are on a limited budget, (I was when I worked for a county agency...)- Create a test server on a similar spec'd workstation and test them together.
The answer to the question is, yes it can be done. Would I do it? From experience probally not. If the database will be critical to your district, put it on a seperate system. One other consideration is that if you did have a problem with the server both mail and the database will be down.
Backup Exec should be fine where it is, considering you probally do your jobs during non-peak times of your exchange server.

G'Luck!

There are two parts to the question of running multiple applications on the same server: 1. do you have enough resources? and 2. is there a business advantage to being able to take down a server for one application without impacting the other?

Asone example of the first consideration, Microsoft makes a product called Small Business Server. By design, it runs Exchange v5.5, SQL Server v6.5/7.0, Proxy Server and some other services (fax sharing, etc.) on the same physical server. There are a couple of things you want to do as far as allocating RAM to Exchange and SQL, but I've seen it work nicely with hardware similar to yours and fairly high demands on the Exchange and SQL Servers. As long as CPU and memory utilization remain within rational limits, it works just fine.

And I have to say that 550x2 and 512meg looks mighty good to me - I currently have a Pentium-75 with 128meg of RAM supporting 60 users for file, print services, mainframe access AND Exchange Server. It's wheezing real bad, and CPU utilization often stays near 100% for the better part of the work day but it rarely crashes. Yeah, we'd all like to have 4gig of RAM but it's not always justified.

As far as the second consideration, let's say your SQL Server goes wacko and develops a problem that only a re-boot will solve. Is a short disruption of Exchange services acceptable? If not, then the mission-critical application (whichever it is) needs to be on a separate server (and that server should also not be a PDC or BDC).

To continue from where you are, I would set up some Performance Monitor charts and just watch the system closely until it's stable with the new database application. If resource utilization is then within normal limits, I'd say you have a good situation and can let future decisions be dictated by business need rather than technical theories about what should or ought to be done.

paul

A significant fact is needed to answer your question, that is, what is the database engine? Access,dbase,sql 6.5,7.0,sql anywhere,progress,foxpro, or an access runtime type database? It makes a huge difference when considering resource hogging and tuning.
If it is a simple file-server type database like access- no problem. If it is a true client/server data base (data resides in server memory and server processes queries)like ms sql, you will encounter definite problems with memory shortages sooner or later as the database grows and mailboxes grow. You will also have an extremely difficult time balancing between the needs of NT,MS-SQL and Exchange .In this senario sql and exchange will both try to keep as much of the databases in system cache as possible.(exchange is a group of databases)A normal view of memory usage on a normal exchange server or sql 6.5 will show massive amounts of memory in use.This is not a bad indication,it simply says that data is in cache.For sql 6.5 you watchfor cache misses,sql 7.0 is auto tuning,and I believe exchange 5.5 is auto tuning.I shudder to think about this combination and how difficult it would be to figure out what needs correction.If its simply an access like database ,you should be fine (assuming that the database processing takes place on the clients ,not the server)

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