Exchange 2003 VM Best Practice?

[hillda01]

Hi,

I've finally managed to convince the company I work for to buy a shiny new Dell Blade Enc and Equallogic SAN.

I've got the full 16 * 450Gb HDD unit, I plan to format the disks using RAID 10 for redundancy and high performance...

I plan to create a new Exchange 2003 server running as a VM with the guest OS being Windows 2003 Ent R2 Sp2.

Does anyone have any best practices on how it should be configured and the best method to back it up.... I've got a real concern that I must get a consistent back up of my Exchange server when I take the snapshot and back it up. My boss wouldnt be too happy with if I couldnt restore the Exchange DB in a good state....

Hope someone can help.

Regards

Dave

[Troy_Clavell]

We don't have exchange running as VM's in our enviornment. However, I did stumble upon this whitepaper and thought you might find it useful if you haven't seen it already

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/exchange_best_practices.pdf

[atbnet]

Use MSCS for exchange.

Create two nodes both with access to central storage on the SAN via an RDM (http://www.vmadmin.co.uk/index.php/resources/35-esxserver/58-rdmvm)

Then create a RDS rule to seperate the nodes to different ESX servers (http://www.vmadmin.co.uk/index.php/resources/36-virtualcenter/59-drsvmhostrules)

That should cove your for if the worst happens. Failing that always have a sound backup plan. You could use VCB and or a backup client inside the VMs.

Andy, VMware Certified Professional (VCP),

If you found this information useful please award points using the buttons at the top of the page accordingly.

[hillda01]

Hi Andy,

I wasnt too keen on the idea of using MSCS, how does VCB get on with backing up a consistent state of the Exchange database.

Can you use RDM with iSCSI? I thought that was just with FC....

Is this how you have got Exchange set up?

Regards

Dave