Vmware 5.0 and Exchange 2010 Storage Advice

[christopherwebb]

Good morning everyone,

I hope I am asking this in the correct place. We are getting ready to stand up a new forest for a new client, which means new stuff - Exchange 2010 (new to us, anyways)!

I have looked through the VMware best practice guide for Exchange on VM, and I think I got it all down except one thing: storage.

Here are my questions:

1. Should I add a "local disk" to the vmdk that will house the exchange installation as well as the mailbox databses? or should I carve out a LUN on our Netapp system and point to those?

2. If the local disk is the way to go, should I make them thin or thick provision? (remember, this is where the mailbox DBs will be)

Thanks for any help! Any other advice would be great, too!

-Chris

[bspagna89]

Hi Chris,

Welcome to the VMware Community.

First, some questions for you.. How is the storage being presented to VMware? Are you using iSCSI, NFS or FibreChannel? It is imporant to keep in mind that Exchange, no matter the version, is not supported on NFS. So you will need to present iSCSI LUNs to VMware for this implementation.

1. Normally, you would present a C: drive to install Windows and Exchange. Then, add volumes for databases/logs (this depends on how you'd like to carve it out). We typically use the VMware Paravirtual SCSI adapter for these as it is the recommended best practice for higher IO applications.

You can look here for more information : http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/exchange-2010-on-vmware-best-practices-guide.pdf

2. I normally see more thick provisioning.

[bspagna89]

Also, dont forget to jetstress the system and make sure you're getting the calculated IOPS per user .