Re: Beginner's Question - Running VMWARE on Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Active/Passive Cluster

Dave.Mishchenko — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 10:45:04 GMT

I'm not sure VMware Server is MS cluster aware, so you might have to use a 3rd party product like this to cluster it - http://www.vm6.ca/product/vmex/default.aspx.

In regards to backups, you could use a script or a 3rd party backup agaent (especially one with an open file agent or the ability to use VSS) on the host. For exchange you might also consider an agent based backup of the information store. Hotbackups of VMs tend to capture the state of the VM in a moment of time and are a bit like pulling the power plug on a server. You should be Ok when you restore the VM, but there's always a chance of corruption.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/54782

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=6489

Performance wise it would really depend on the load of active directory and exchange. In general I would avoid running an app and VMware server both on the host and they will compete for resources. You might be better off running both as VMs. If you plan for a large number of users, you might consider VMware ESX instead. It's a bit harder to learn, but it has very little overhead compared to VMware Server or MS Virtual Server so you'll get the best performance from it. It does support the setup of MS clusters as VMs, but also has a high availability option (restarts a VM if the host fails) which might be sufficient for your needs. You would also go with 2 ESX hosts with independent storage and replicate your VMs between hosts for recovery. What sort of hardware were you thinking of using and how many AD / exchange users do you need to support?

Beginner's Question - Running VMWARE on Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Active/Passive Cluster

try and prosper — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 04:03:34 GMT

I would like to set-up two WinTel 2003 R2 Enterprise Servers acting as Domain Controllers. These Servers will be Clustered as Active/Passive. They will also act as a VMWare Server, the Virtual Machines will be 2 x Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Servers running either Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition or Exchange 2007 Enterprise Edition also as an Active/Passive Cluster (or in Exchange 2007's case Single Copy Cluster). My next question may sound silly so please understand my knowledge of Virtual Machine Technologies has been influenced by the information i have managed to find so far on the web, and it all points to VMWare and its competition being only really suitable for test environment scenarios. what i would like to know is if VMWare is suitable in a live enviroment for the scenario i have presented? What are some of the pitfalls of using such technology in a live environment? Is recovering from a disaster such as corrupt VMWare files or failed RAID on the host Server (relatively) simple to recover from? Would you run a Single instance of Veritas Backup Exec on the host to backup the Virtual Machines or would you also need to run a backup solution specifically designed for VMWare? Is there a hardware requirement guide which will give me an idea of what kind of server i will need to build in order to handle the workload?

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Re: Beginner's Question - Running VMWARE on Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Active/Passive Cluster

Beginner's Question - Running VMWARE on Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Active/Passive Cluster