VMware Cloud Community
cambee
Contributor
Contributor

Deploying exchange 2007 in ESXi4 – storage spindle configuration?

I am starting you get a good understanding of VMware but had some questions on it architecturally when it comes to the design of the hardware mainly drive configuration and if it's necessary to go to this length...

I am in the process of designing a host (HP DL380G5) that will host 2 vm's both Exchange 2007 and a Blackerry Ent Server. Currently I have exchange 2003 installed with direct attached storage. The drives I have are: 4x 36GB (15k), 4x 72GB (15k) and 10 146GB (10k). Have about 100GB in total between both mailbox stores with a 3rd store for sending all email to an online archive. The server is broken down to have OS, Pagefile, Logs and MTA all on their own RAID 1 drives. The datastores are on a stack of 10 drives in a RAID 10 config. The server was built for speed and reliability against drive failure. Moving forward this appears to be a little overkill for what we need for 36 users although we do have some serious outlook users with a handful or so hovering around 4GB which is the soft limit (notification). We use our public folders pretty extensively too. Also, our BES server sits on a desktop and needs to move to a server.

My question is how to configure the hdds to accommodate Exchange 2007 and BES 5. I'm thinking:

2x 36 (RAID 1) = ESXi

2x 36 (RAID 1) = Exchange 2007

2x 72 (RAID 1) = Exchange Logs

2x 72 (RAID 1) = BES

5x 146 (RAID 5) = Datastores/MTA

5x 146 (RAID 5) = free

Does this look good or does anyone have any suggestions? Any insight is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Reply
0 Kudos
3 Replies
amvmware
Expert
Expert

You have a good understanding of the requirements of exchange 2007 mailbox server role design i would assume the other exchange server is a hub\cas server. I would ask the following questions.

1. You have 3 VM 's - is the storage local or SAN attached . You indicate a single Dl380 G5 server and it depends on how important email is to your business - but a single ESX host is a single point of failure for the 3 VM's.

2. I am not sure about your disk partitioning - why not create an exchange mailbox server VM and either have the VM's VMDK's in the same VMFS datastore as the Exchange host or create dedicated datastores for the different VMDK files - if it is required - unless these are all 36 heavy mailbox users then you should be OK with VMFS datastores rather than using RDM's.

Reply
0 Kudos
cambee
Contributor
Contributor

It is all direct attached storage.

Currently I have a exchange 2003 server running in production. It is a standard physical configuration with Server 2003/Exchange 2003 installed directly to the box. I am going to swing the mailboxes to a temporary server with 2003 server, reconfigure the current one with esxi4 and create 2 VM's, one for server 2008/exchange2007 and the other for BES. That is all this server will house right now.

The dl380g5 has 8 drives in it. 4x 36gb and 4x72 gb. I have an MSA50 disk enclosure directly SCSI attached with 10x 146gb drives in it. Email is very important and we use doubletake to replicate both exchange and BES to a hotsite location over VPN. This will be the 2nd virtual host I am configuring and I just want to keep as much of the performance I have now with the flexibility of going virtual. I was thinking of keeping the VM's on their own array as well as the vmdk's for the logs and datastores. I also wanted to create more space for an additional VM to use for future exchange upgrades.

Reply
0 Kudos
amvmware
Expert
Expert

The only thing that i can see would impact Exchange performance is if the exchange server is being heavily utilised by all 36 users - if you only have a few heavy users then it should not be an issue to virtualise exchange and use VMDK's on a single or multiple datastores.

Other things i would do.

1. Setup performance counters so you know how it is currently performing and it provides a baseline to performance when physical. - Usual things, CPU, Memory, disk and exchange counters - see MS doc for relevant Exchange counters.

2. See the following VMware article on virtualising exchange -

Reply
0 Kudos