Not knowing your configuration in detail leads to more questions than answers. But, a properly configured ESX/iSCSI setup will absolutely scream. I have yet to virtualize our Exchange environment but our SQL server performance increased at least 50% on average when we went from direct attached Ultra 320 SAS drives in a raid 10 config to our EQ SAN with SATA's. The physical box and ESX Host were identical servers. And that was mostly because of increased spindles and a whole lot more cache on the controllers. I know it's like comparing apples to oranges with your environment but generally speaking there's best practices for ESX and iSCSI no matter who your vendor is. EQ has some excellent white papers for properly configured VM Exchange servers using iSCSI with MPIO inside the guest. And the examples they test are running 5000 users per guest with varying mail store sizes. I'm sure IBM does to. And starting with ESX 4 you can do MPIO with your iSCSI storage at the Host level which is suppose to increase performance also.
________________________________ From: Phil Hershey [mailto:phers...@agia.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 12:13 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: MS Support on VMware? Thanks, Dave. I expect a large part of the reason our performance is so poor is that we haven't had the ability to dedicate spindle sets on our NetApp to Exchange or the SQL servers either. These each get a blade of their own natively running the OS/app (not virtualized), but they're all sharing just a couple of 'aggregates' between a number of machines that are shared with 4 blades running ESX 3.0.2 and hosting a number of 'small' servers. Of course the NetApp vender said this would be just fine. Horse-hockey. I'll definitely be running the TSA as soon as I can schedule a weekend window with no backup running. Thanks again. Philip From: Dave Wade [mailto:dave.w...@stockport.gov.uk] Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 9:33 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: MS Support on VMware? Possibly.... but I thought it a valid question and worth pondering on.... I suspect that the existing performance sucks because iSCSI SAN can't deliver the IOPS Exchange 2003 needs. Our main Exchange servers are Exchange 2003 still on real boxes and performance is generally "Ok(ish)" but we have dedicated raid arrays in a Fibre connected the SAN for both the logs and databases. When the Raid Groups were shared with other high performance servers we did get performance issues. I suspect if Phillip downloads the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant (TSA) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=4bdc1d6b-de3 4-4f1c-aeba-fed1256caf9a&displaylang=en and runs it it will help him understand why the existing server performance sucks. Until he understand what's wrong with the existing system he won't know if moving forward will cure it or kill it. So if the TSA reports no issues on the Exchange boxes then it could be network issues are causing the slow down. We also run an Exchange 2007 system for our school staff in Virtual (VmWare 4.0u1) but with an Hitachi Fibre SAN with dedicated Raid-10 drives for the mail box stores. In general performance is OK but it did graunch a tad when we were migrating data. I am about to start migrating the 2003 boxes to 2010 and don't really expect too many issues with performance, but I did stick an extra 16Gb of RAm in the VMWare hosts I am going to use. One "problem" with Exchange 2007 and 2010 and VMware is that they reduced the disk performance needs by using "large" amounts of RAM as disk cache. So when you stick them in VMWare you need to make sure you have enough free RAM for Exchange to use.... So I think some of my managers are going to miffed when I say they can't get 10 x Exchange Mailbox Servers with 7000 users on each in a the size of VMWare box they are currently buying. (But I will now let them use most of the disk space)..... Dave Wade Business Services I.C.T. 0161 474 5456 ________________________________ From: Jonathan Link [mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com] Sent: 10 November 2010 17:06 To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: MS Support on VMware? I don't disagree. However, I was providing a generic answer to a generic and obviously completely unresearched question. A bit of clicking through the links would likely provide more complete information. A google search would probably be, good, too. I spent more time on this answer than I did on my answer to the OP. On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Dave Wade <dave.w...@stockport.gov.uk> wrote: Not sure thats the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth...... There are some specific exceptions for Exchange in Virtual. 1) Mixing Database Availability Groups and VMWare availability tools (e.g. HA) is not supported. I guess the issue is that the database may fail over while the machine is being migrated. See the blog some one else has just posted. This makes designing a supported solution "interesting" because it would be nice to have your "Live/production" database server in a VMWare cluster for hardware resilience and have a second standby server on another site for disaster recovery. This is unsupported. To be supported you must put TWO virtual servers in the local VMWare farm and exclude them from HA and have a third at your disaster recovery site. 2) The Unified Messaging role is not supported in virtual. Dave Wade Business Services I.C.T. 0161 474 5456 ________________________________ From: Jonathan Link [mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com] Sent: 10 November 2010 16:45 To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: MS Support on VMware? http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=897615 On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Phil Hershey <phers...@agia.com> wrote: Under what conditions, if any, will MS support Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere? Our current Exchange 2003 is running on an IBM blade/NetApp iSCSI SAN on ESX 3.0.2, and performance sucks. Unfortunately the 'let's virtualize it' flu is running rampant here, although my vote is to take the Exchange system physical (~450 users and 500GB in EDB, STM, LOG files). Thanks. Philip --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist ********************************************************************** Cut Carbon, Save Money, Save the Environment. 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