ESX 3.5 and Exchange 2003

[musc_county_is]

We are using ESX 3.5 with current patches as of first part of December 2007 and are running several VMs on an EqualLogic PS5000E with 2 host systems with 24GB RAM. Our Exchagne 2003 server crashed in mid-December and VMware was able to concoct in and rebuild form the vmdk files, but since then we ahve been running into connection issues on the Outlook clients. There are no error messages on the Exchange server event logs, VM or host servers and when running the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant it sometimes comes back good and other times it shows both disk bottleneck errors and RPC errors.

After the server was recreated from its vmdk files we reinstalled VMware Tools and are now looking at other areas for a solution. We are moving the mailbox and public stores to their own drive and doing the same with the transaction log files to another drive. When doing this, is it recommended to have these new drives on their own controllers (SCSI 1:1, SCSI 2:1, etc...) or leave them on the same controller as the current drives? Is there any benefit to using a separate controller in the VM similar to that in the physical world?

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

[Lightbulb]

I would recommend setting up a second Exchange 2003 VM join it to the organization and migrate content and functions over to new VM. You should find it troubling that you are getting flaky behavior on a system that was brought back online after a systemic failure and receive nothing in the way of error logs. If it was a physical system I would do the same thing especially as Mail systems are central to any organizations function. Here you have the advantage of not needed to request new hardware yeah Virtualization, although resources on hosts/cluster will be impacted during migration.

As to the separate SCSI controllers in the VM there may be some benefit internally to the Guest OS as far management traffic, but I dont really know if it would be a great deal.

Separating out the functions of the exchange server onto separate drives is a very good idea. You also want to ensure you set the proper offset on the new drives.

Tom Halligan

[musc_county_is]

Can you explain what you mean by "proper offset on the new drives?"

Thanks you for your response and migrating to a new system is somethign that I have conseidered due to the facts you mention, but wanted to explore other avenues if possible.

[Lightbulb]

Check the second point in the following article "Create aligned partitions"

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6111093.html

Tom Halligan