First off I would take any consultant recommendations with grain of salt. The type of virtualization he's talking about requires major investments in capital and human resources. VMware ESX w. Virtual Center licensing & rolling out a SAN environment is not exactly cheap. You have to add to it troubleshooting, administration and the learning curve. Add to it other considerations such as backup, etc. All this adds up quickly. And don't forget you're talking about your mission critical servers here.
Now with ESX version 3, to save $$, you can use NAS boxes and do VC in addition, but there's a performance hit. I would hold off until you thoroughly analyze the pluses & minuses to see if pluses truly outweigh the minuses. Then if it does, I would build a test lab with EXCH, SQL, DCs, etc. and test the heck out of it. I have a VMware cost analysis spreadsheet that I put together a while back. If you want to take a look, ping me offline and I'll send you a copy. Alex -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Himasou Makwana Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 3:50 AM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Exchange and VMWare We are actually in the process of doing a similar migration into VMWARE. I am still unsure about virtualising our critical exchange and sql. But our consultant informs me that as long as we have a high performing SAN, it should be no problem. Instead of having two individual clusters, just host them on 3 powerful VM servers and have vmotion as our fault tolerance. Then use double take to replicate it to our co-lo. We only have about 500 or so users, so its not that heavily used. What do you guys think? Himasou Makwana Senior IT System Manager Advance Security Tel: 01895 201 880 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dean Cunningham Sent: 07 November 2007 22:14 To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Exchange and VMWare Weeeeeeell, lets just say Ed and Chris have forgotten more than I know about Exchange. As a small shop guy (20 -30 servers) with a small team , so I wear the management, development, support, helpdesk hats. I personally see virtualisation theme (Server , Storage and Client) optimising the use of servers that are only there because we have to make them separate because it is not recommended by vendors or it is just know that apps don't play well together. So the exchange, SQL, Citrix are not heavily used and strained. It enables us to save money to provide a DRP service that would not normally be financially viable to achieve. I hope to reduce the server count to 5 from the 20 - 30 (inc test environs and the additional DRP environs). In the first cut I'll only get down to 10 due to HW support limitations of VMWare, but I am sure over the next few years I will get it down to 5 as VMWare or MS VS improves. I also see the less physical resources we use the better this earth will be maintained. No I am not a greenie, just a realist, We have not travelled further than the moon.... On that cheery note.. have a great day! -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alex Alborzfard Sent: Thursday, 8 November 2007 05:19 To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Exchange and VMWare I'm not up on EX 07 and I certainly have much less knowledge about it than Ed, Dean, Chris, and other gurus on this list. However, I know a bit about VMware virtualization and I have to say it's not for everything and everyone. As Ed pointed out, you have to ask management what they're trying to accomplish by running EX on VMware. Have they just read an article in e-week or one of other trade magazines and decided that's the way to go? Virtualization and VMware is mainly intended for those under-utilized (memory, CPU-wise) "One-APP" servers, not heavily used and strained Exchange, SQL or Citrix, etc. servers. Just my 2 cents! Btw Albert, as of now only VMware supports 64-bit VMs. Alex -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Albert Duro Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:44 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Re: Exchange and VMWare I can't say much about Exchange on VMWare, but for what it's worth, I can relate my disastrous experience in trying to run 07 on MS Virtual Server. (lab situation) Turns out you cannot install 64-bit Exchange 07 on a 64-bit MSVS! You can only run 32-bit software on a 64-bit Virtual Machine. Makes perfect sense. To the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, anyway. As soon as I got a grip on myself, I saw that I had a gorgeous Virtual Server all dressed with nowhere to go. It would be a shame to waste it (and having taken much longer to build, upgrade, and patch than a real server), so if I couldn't put the REAL Exchange on it, why not try the 32-bit evaluation Exchange 07? It would still be a good lab thingy. It installed allright. Sort of. But it was unstable and buggy -- never worked right. Now that DID make sense: a 32-bit impersonator running in a 64-bit Virtual Machine on 64-bit hardware just wasn't going to be very happy. So I flattened the Virtual Server and turned to more sensible pursuits. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miller, Robert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Exchange Discussions" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 7:17 AM Subject: Exchange and VMWare Hello all. I hope this topic has not been beat to death. We plan on upgrading to Exchange 2007 early next year. One of the ideas from manegemnt is to run exchange 2007 on VMWare and a SAN. My main areas of concern are support (see the links below), and performance (I/O). We have 72 offies, 90+% being 500 users or less. Anyone else running Exchange 2007 on VMWare/SAN. Any issues with support from MS and/or I/O? Any thoughts and suggestions would be much appreciated... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320220/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/ TIA This message may contain confidential and privileged information. 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