Virtualizing Exchange 2007

[davidn-ua]

Guys - have read heaps of articles on the above and trying to work out the best way to configure my site with DR in mind. Running 3.02 and have upgraded to 3.5 with no issues on a Dell PE2900 with 16GB Ram, we are also running 8 other vm's including ISA06, AD, DNS, DHCP etc etc in a production environment and all run sweet as. The only issue I have is the install of exchange and the placement of the logs/DB i.e. virtual to physical - if I place the db and logs on a SAN then if a disaster strikes I would have major problems if I am not running vmotion - correct? If it resides in virtual land and I take a snapshot these all reside in the VMDK file so recovery is much easier (after running a consistency check of course) - keep in mind that we are only a small site with approx 50 users so the load would be fairly light. I would welcome any suggestions, pointers and expert advice - thanks

[dconvery]

A couple of years ago, we converted our Exchange 2003 server from P2V. Since the data was already on an EVA LUN, we just left it there. Once the machine was converted to a VM, we just created RDMs in virtual compatibilty mode. This allows for snapshots via VMware if needed. The snapshot files will reside within VMFS. VMotion also works fine as long as you present the RDM LUNs to all of the ESX hosts in the cluster.

As for backup / recovery, using VCB will allow for a quiesced backup, but most activities of a backup admin that are releated to email usually involve recovering a mailbox. During DR, they just do a recovery of the mail store. This will require a backup agaent anyway, so VCB is not a good fit here. I do not know of a way to just do a VMDK backup of just the C: using VCB, which would be nice to have during a DR for faster recovery. Does anyone else just backup selected VMDK files using VCB?

Dave