Exchange 2003 running on VMware?

[cwhitmore]

I'm in the research phase for our disaster recovery site. We currently run Exchange 2003 Enterprise on a Dell 2850.

I'd like to install Exchange 2003 and MS SQL 2000/2005 on a beefed up PowerEdge in our DR site, both on the same box.

Has anyone tested this senerio in a DR site or production? (we have 130 users)

Just wondering if this is going to work. If so, will it work with the VM Server Player or do I need the $$$ version?

[Chris_S_UK]

Granted you're talking about a DR scenario, but I would not even think about running that number of users on VMs hosted on the VMware Server product. ESX is the way to go....

Chris

[TomHowarth]

for a DR solution it might just work, however preformance would be less that addiqute, I would have a word with your boss and request a ESX Starter license if you are serious about providing any sort of service post DR, it is only $1000 dollars for a 2 Proc license.

[vmNewb35]

We are in the process of migrating from Exchange 5.5 with about 3000 mailboxes and have successfully migrated to Ex2003 about 6 times to practice and work out the bugs. We now have moved about 500 mailboxes (users) to the live Ex2003 running on ESX and it performs smashingly well....surprisingly so it seems. We thought that when we finally started the live migration we might have to go with new physical hosts, but so far ESX is running like a champ.

[TomHowarth]

further and contrary to what MS says, I now have a client running Exchange 2007 completlely under ESX VI3, admittedly it is not a complex site only 100 users but preformance is better than their old Exchange 2000 environment.

[MarkNorman]

Personally I would keep Exchange 2003 running on Physical boxes. Especially if you have plenty of users.

[MattG]

We currently have 7 ESX hosts with a new DR Data Center coming online next year. Currently, our 500 users Exchange 2003 server is a VM. The plan is to migrate our SQL servers to VMs as well.

Our DR plan is to purchase 4 ESX hosts for the DR site and run XOSoft's WANSync inside of the Exchange and SQL VMs for HA of these cirtical apps between facilities. The remaining non-HA VMs will be asynchronously replicated to the DR site. So our DR failover for the non-HA VMs will entail modifying the IPs in the DR site and starting them up.

Full DR recovery time using ESX in both sites will be less than 4 hours. Less than 15 minutes for the HA VMs running XoSoft.

I am hoping that VMWare is working on HA between facilities (subnets) for the next major VI3 release. I do not need them to do the replication, but if they could facilitate the automated IP change and and startup of the VM in the DR site, that would be great. Would reduce my full DR recovery time from hours to minutes.

-MattG

[Anders]

Personally I would keep Exchange 2003 running on

Physical boxes. Especially if you have plenty of

users.

I have costumers running 2000 users per VM.

Using the MMB benchmark we get about 2200 on a 2 vCPU VM.

The largest exchange deployment I'm aware of is 30000 users.

I have been involved in sizing a costumer case for 10000 users,

migration starting this month.

A US costumer is planning to go above 100000 users next year...

So please define "plenty of users" for me...

We're working with partners to publish some sizing guidelines soon.

\- Anders

[vmNewb35]

I agree with Anders...VMWare is a great solution for Exchange. Keep in mind what kind of disks you assign to these. We tried SATA but they were way too slow for all that activity and have gone back to fiber channel.

It goes without saying that all shops are unique, but with VM you can make substantial inroads to solving the mail issue.

[mreferre]

100000 Exch users on VMware ?

Anders, it's true that for an hammer the world is all nails....

Massimo.

[MarkNorman]

You would have to have a very low virtualization ratio to get acceptable performance.... and that defeats some of the benefits of going virtual in my opinion.

2200 users per VM might be attainable, but how many VM's are you getting per processor.... or per host. 4 VM's per 8way host?? This would mean that each Exchange VM is chewing up a 2 processor ESX VIN license. Very expensive solution, especially given the cost of these (for example) 8 way machines.

Why not stay physical in this instance?

I run about 3000 users off 2 exchange 2003 servers- each of these servers costs about the same as a 2 processor ESX VIN license (forget the cost of the ESX hardware)... they run blindingly fast, and are MSCS clustered so have no single point of failure, etc.

[Anders]

Well, 2200 user measured with Loadsim, I'd say thats about average user load...

Of course then you're using 100% of 2 cpu's.

The thing is you do get all the glory of virtualization,

that's a big thing for a lot of costumers.

Just look at the ease of making good DR solutions.

The 10k costumer I'm working with has ditched MSCS,

because HA is good enough.

Saves them a lot of money, and quite a few headaches...

\- Anders