Exchange 2007

[chaz112182]

I am in the process of planning our Exchange 2007 architecture. Currently we have one HP DL380 G4 hosting Exchange 2003. We have about 250 mailboxes. My plan is to run the Hub Transport and Client Access roles on virtual machines hosted on ESX 3.5. I plan on using an HP DL380 G5 to run the Mailbox Server role. Anyone running Exchange 2007 in this fashion (or similar) ? Anyone running Exchange 2007 100% virtualized ? Just looking for some feedback on performance,etc and/or recommendations. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

[msemon1]

We have:

2 Hub Transport

2 Client Access

4 Mailbox Servers

All are VM's with Exchange 2007. Our mailbox servers are using CCR for clustering. Make sure and allow enough SAN space for your storage groups. Each should be less than 100GB. We have 20+ storage groups.

Mike

[danpalacios]

We have a split harware/virtual Exchange 2007 setup. We have 1 mailbox server (serving about 100 mailboxes) and a CAS (serving owa) on vmware. The other mailbox servers (including a CCR cluster) and a Hub Transport + CAS on hardware. As long as your esx hosts have the resources, there seems to be no issue with virtualizing. Unless your 250 users are spam engines, I seriously doubt your Hub/CAS will generate enough I/O to warrant a physical machine.

[davidbarclay]

Why wouldn't you virtualise the lot? With the right architecture, it's capable of scalling to tens of thousands of users.

We run 500+ users (I consider it a small environment) fully virtualised and it's never missed a beat.

Dave

[msemon1]

We have 1200+ users with everything virtualized. The one thing we did do is put the Hub Transport and Client Access servers is a separate cluster from the mailbox servers. The Hub Transport and Client Access Servers can be VMotioned and moved around. The mailbox servers are in their own cluster and are setup not to be VMotioned. This is because of the CCR for high availablitiy. The Mailbox servers can be failed over to backup server, however, Vmotioning them can mess up the CCR so they stay put on host they are on.

[azn2kew]

To give you more confidence of configuration and architecture for Exchange 2007/VMware, read this and you can get best practice guide from VMworld 2008 as well. We've virtualized 100% of our Exchange 2007 environment and it runs really well fully redundant with CCR for mailboxes and the rest can utilize VMware HA, DRS and VMotion as well. Plan your storage groups and SAN accordingly and should have enough resources to handle the load (RAM, CPU)

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[chaz112182]

hello thanks to all for the great feedback. had some network issues that came up and am now finally getting back around to planning exchange 2007 environment. one major roadblock that i am dealing with is the lack of shared storage. currently, all esx servers are running direct attached storage. we have future plans to add SAN appliance but at the moment all servers are DAS. considering that all esx servers are DAS would it still be recommended to run mailbox role as virtual machine ?? i'm thinking that i could maybe setup an ESXi host to run all exchange roles so that when we do get the SAN (which should be within 3-6 months) i could do a storage vMotion to migrate all data off DAS over to SAN. my concern with this would be how would i oblige with MS best practice of OS, database files, log files all residing on seperate physical disks for best performance? fyi, I've been given the green light to purchase an hp DL380 G6 for this project. we're being hard pressed to get this in production asap because of performance problems with our current exchange 2003 environment. again, any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[msemon1]

For storage we have something like this:

C: OS VMDK

😧 Exchange VMDK

E: Transaction Logs VMDK

F: Storage Group 1 RDM LUN Physical

G: Storage Group 1 RDM LUN Physical

Are you planning on putting your storage groups on VMDK's or RDM LUN's.? If you put them on VDMK's then I don't see why you could not SVMotion them as long as the hosts sees the storage.

We can't VMotion or snapshot since we care using RDM Lun's in physical mode.

Mike

[ChrisDearden]

I've got an envorinment for 2000+ users on 3 combined HT/CAS/MB VM's ( 2VCPU , 8Gb RAM )

Storage is mounted directly via iscsi initiators in the VM. We used the storage group calculator for the disk layout and have ended up with about 3 SG's per iSCSI volume , but with seperate log volumes.

[ChrisDearden]

Interesting to see you've virtualised the CCR cluster - in theory there are not supported where you have hypervisor based clustering - have you worked around that ?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794548.aspx