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ecleppe
Contributor
Contributor

Need assistance in countering my exchange admin !

Hello everyone,

I finally convinced my Exchange admin to add a virtual exchange 2007 server to his mail domain.

I'm lost in all the docs that I've read about this, there are just too many people saying different things.

The aim is to have around 800 to 1000 users on this server and it will serve as CAS/HUB/MBX.

About our hardware.

ESX3.5 update 3 is installed on a BL460 server which is a 2 x dual core CPU blade with 32 GB memory.

It is SAN connected using fibrechannel and storage layout has been done according to the Microsoft best practices. (OS = VMDK, Exchange Install = VMDK , LOG = RDM RAID1, STORE = RDM RAID1)

I have assigned 8GB memory and 2 vCPU's to the virtual machine and Windows 2008 is installed as the guest OS.

Yesterday he already moved about 10 users to that machine and now he already tells me that according to task manager his Exchange is already using 6GB of RAM and he will not be able to move 900 users on this machine.

The exchange server is currently the only VM running on that particular host.

Can you please give me some advice on how to counter his ideas, how to get valuable performance monitoring or other feedback.

Note that I don't know much about Exchange.

Thanks in advance

Erik

Message was edited by: RDPetruska

Removed emoticon from subject line.

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11 Replies
Zahni
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

if it an 64-Bit VM with 2008 ?

Make sure, you have set mem.ShareScanGHZ = 0 (reboot ESX after that.

And make sure, you have non active snapshot. Snapshots are causing big performance impacts.

-Zahni

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ecleppe
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, it's a Windows 2008 64 bit VM.

I'll look into that command.

Thank you for your response

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

Isn't that normal for Exchange 2007? 4GB + 3-5MB(more or less depending on usage) per mailbox? And the OS also needs some memory as well, take a look at this sizing sheet: http://www.msexchange.org/articles-tutorials/exchange-server-2007/planning-architecture/exchange-200...

Duncan

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

with setting mem.ShareScanGHZ to 0 you will disable transparrent page sharing, I've personally never ever disabled this and hardly see the point in doing so.

Duncan

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Zahni
Contributor
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Hi,

read http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1004901&sl... 0 14615122

I had this problem on "my" BL 465C G5

Ok, not yet tested, what happend with update 4.

-Zahni

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

Yes, it can be a problem... but it doesn't explain his memory "problem".

Duncan

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Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Right off the bat the biggest issue is that your Exchange admin doesn't understand that Windows 2008 automatically will cache almost every bit of memory available to the server. If you boot up that box with no users on it and give it 16GB of RAM, you will find probably 15GB of RAM cached. That is why 2008 is so much more scalable then 2003.

Windows 2003 would ALWAYS use a combination of RAM and disk for paging...Windows 2008 creates one huge ass RAM based page file and only goes to disk when that runs out...

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Josh26
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Yes agreed with Rumple above. This is fairly normal for Exchange. The amount of RAM it consumes has little to do with the number of users on it.

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Quigibo
Contributor
Contributor

I agree. Your Exchange admin hasn't played with Windows 2008 or Vista very much. The OS alone caches as much memory as possible. Additionally, how big are these users mailboxes? Exchange 2007 x64 will naturally cache as much in memory as possible. We run an Exchange 2007 org with 7000 users on 2 4 core physical boxes each with 32GB of RAM. After we migrated the first 100-200 users, a single exchange server used 15GB of the 32GB. Some folks freaked out, but failed to remember the 5mb per user formula and also failed to recall that Exchange 2003 maxed out at 1.3-1.5GB of RAM usage. Right now, our servers run about 28-30GB used for RAM with 99.8% of all storage I/O cached in memory. We plan on migrating this cluster to VM in the next 12 months.

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s1xth
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Just curious, but what is 'YOUR' plan for migrating your exchange environment to virtual? (san configuration etc?) jw. thanks!

http://www.virtualizationimpact.com http://www.handsonvirtualization.com Twitter: @jfranconi
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Quigibo
Contributor
Contributor

We currently run a Netapp FAS6080 with iSCSI and NFS based storage. Our Exchange 2007 cluster uses iSCSI for storage. It is a 3 node cluster now, 2 physical (active) and 1 virtual (passive). Our intent is to add 3-4 more virtual (passive) nodes and simply fail the active ones over. Our existing active/physical nodes have 32GB of ram BUT if you use 5mb per user and we have 7000 users that is 35GB of total memory across both clusters. We'll likely end up running this on a 4 node Exchange cluster, each node having 4 cpu's and 16GB of RAM (3 active / 1 passive). This gives us a total of 12 CPU's and 48GB of RAM for exchange. A "downgrade" from where we are now, but more than the 35GB that we need for best practice.

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