#Exchange 2010 on VMware

#exchange2010

From NetApp .. Huumm .. http://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-7535?REF_SOURCE=tot-1009&h

When you think about running Microsoft® Exchange 2010 on VMware®, it’s easy to come up with good reasons for doing so:

• Better utilize your processor cores. Large, multicore servers are becoming the norm, but most applications cannot take advantage of all the cores in a physical server.
• Isolate roles without adding hardware expense. Exchange 2010 has evolved into a modular architecture with distinct server roles, including mailbox, edge transport, hub transport, and client access. Isolating these roles can make it much easier to troubleshoot Exchange problems, but that would require a lot of physical servers, especially in smaller environments.
• Avoid overprovisioning. It’s always hard to know what the future is going to mean in terms of your Exchange requirements. Running Exchange on VMware means you can provide the right resources now and add them incrementally as you need them, avoiding expensive overprovisioning upfront.
• More easily meet your business requirements. The way you design your Exchange deployment might depend on your specific requirements. Do you need to have a separate mailbox server for each department or business unit? Virtualization makes it simple to accomplish that without raising your hardware expenses and physical server count.
• Provision a new Exchange server rapidly. Provisioning a physical server is time consuming, even when you already have the hardware. With VMware it’s easy to create a template for each type of Exchange server and save them to speed the deployment of servers of the same type in the future.
• Maintain an Exchange lab. Need to maintain a lab to test and troubleshoot Exchange? VMware virtualization is a great foundation for your Exchange 2010 evaluation and testing processes.
• Clone for testing and troubleshooting. Snapshot™ copies and clones give you the power to rapidly clone a particular Exchange VM for troubleshooting.

Despite these and other advantages, there are several questions that I hear almost every time I talk to people about running Exchange on VMware. In this article, I’m going to try and address the most common concerns and provide some best practices associated with running Exchange in joint VMware and NetApp® environments.