I had lunch today with a group of IT people that were all interested in talking about virtualizing Exchange. Some had already done it and others were still in the early planning stages. What was most interesting to me is how much the conversation around virtualizing Exchange on ESX has changed over the past couple of years.

At VMworld 2007 I presented a session with Kong about the performance of virtualized Exchange Server 2007 on ESX 3. At that time most people were really concerned about performance and supportability. The tests that I did showed that the performance was great. The support aspects were finally addressed when Microsoft announced the SVVP programa little later.

The discussion I had today was mainly focused on two areas. The first was what are the best practices for virtualizing Exchange. We have done lots of testing with Exchange over the last several years and the consensus is that you can use Microsoft best practices for physical machines to size your virtual machines. There are lots of detailed tests that support this result, but that is a quick way to summarize it. The second issue was that the Exchange Admin was not ready to give up his physical server and for one reason or another did not want to embrace running Exchange in a Virtual Machine. This is a more difficult issue to deal with, but one way is to do pilot program with a small number of users and then build from there.

The issue no longer seems to be can it be done, but how can you help me do it.

Todd