Thin provisioning is different than "Virtual disks that dynamically expand".
There are many storage vendors that have specific solutions that are allow Exchange to be supported. Check out the ESRP: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb412164.aspx Chuck Robinson _______________ Sr. Solutions Architect MCITP:EA, Messaging / MCSE: Messaging EMC Consulting Mobile: 973-865-0394 chuck.robin...@emc.com www.emc.com/consulting Transforming Information Into Business Results -----Original Message----- From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:mich...@smithcons.com] Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 1:35 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Guidance on disks for Exchange 2010 Microsoft is not in the business of supporting third party storage systems. :-P If you call PSS and complain "Exchange is slow" and it's because every time a new block is written to the database and this causes the database to expand, the thinly-provisioned disk institutes a 100 ms delay to allocate that additional storage, why would you expect Microsoft to support that? Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -----Original Message----- From: Kurt Buff [mailto:kurt.b...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 1:28 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Guidance on disks for Exchange 2010 So, if I host my Exchange DB on a Lefthand that is thin provisioned, that's unsupported? Or, continuing on my Lefthand example, I've shut down the VM, expanded the space allocated to the drive on which the DB resides, then use diskpart to expand the partition to the size of the allocated disk - this isn't supported? It's so very vague... Kurt On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 09:01, Michael B. Smith <mich...@smithcons.com> wrote: > Note: I am not recommending you go against published guidance from MSFT. > > > > That being said – that recommendation is primarily against the > original Hyper-V. VHDs created by the original version of Hyper-V, or > disks that have been upgraded from Virtual Server or Virtual PC, expand quite > slowly. > > > > Disks that are created by Hyper-V R2 are only a couple of percentage > points slower than fixed size VHDs. Negligible. > > > > I know a number of companies that are running Hyper-V R2 installations > with variable disks. So far, at least, it hasn’t been an issue. > > > > I don’t know how (or even if) this impacts VMware or XenServer. > > > > So….to tie this back to your question, if the storage virtualization > causes Exchange to notice whenever the disk expands, it’s not a good fit. > > > > Regards, > > > > Michael B. Smith > > Consultant and Exchange MVP > > http://TheEssentialExchange.com > > > > From: Sobey, Richard A [mailto:r.so...@imperial.ac.uk] > Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 6:35 AM > To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues > Subject: Guidance on disks for Exchange 2010 > > > > In the virtualisation guide for Exchange 2010, in the section on > storage this is written: > > > > Virtual disks that dynamically expand aren't supported by Exchange. > > > > Does anyone know if this also applies to a disk presented to a > physical server via some form of storage virtualisation appliance? > Said disk would be presented as 100GB, for example, and the OS would > see 100GB, but would grow to reach this size at the storage level. > > > > Thanks > > > > Richard > >
