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Leo_Smith
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Exchange 2007

My colleague went to the Microsoft 2007 new lineup event and she told me MS said: ” Exchange 2007 will be the biggest change. It cannot run in VM, must be on it's own hardware. They recommend dual-processor with no less than 8GB memory. “

Does anybody know if this is true?

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cheeko
Expert
Expert

Totally agree, but 70 Users are not 5000 ...

Beside that MS is claiming that they reduced the overall I/O load by up to 70% comparing to Exchange 2003 (if you have enough RAM). Some Opteron Machines support up to 64GB of RAM, so that would be an option ...

But anyway i migrated several Exchange 2003 setups (from 10 to 200 Users) and did not see any performance issues so far.

Any other thoughts?

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TomHowarth
Leadership
Leadership

I am now running an Exchange 2007 server hosting 150 users, so far no issues, but will be monitoring. Smiley Happy

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
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cheeko
Expert
Expert

Tom, how does your Exchange 2007 VM(s) look like? Memory? vDisks?

Do you have a SAN behind? Did you split DB and Logs? RAID-Levels?

Just curious about some more details ...

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letoatrads
Expert
Expert

Yes, Details man, details.....strip the little filly down for us.

Oh god, I've just realized I spend WAY to much time working on VM setups 😃

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TomHowarth
Leadership
Leadership

patience, all comes to those that wait. Smiley Wink

I am not on that client's site at the moment, I am currently expected there tomorrow, I will have an update for you then.

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
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cheeko
Expert
Expert

I'm getting crazy here ... the customers "chief" consultant urges us to create a dedicated RAID1 LUN on SAN level where the vmdk for the exchange transaction log has to reside on. He "heard" that exchange transaction logs on RAID5 (our default config for the VMFS LUNs) isn't a good idea ...

we call that dangerous semi-knowledge here ...

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cheeko
Expert
Expert

Sorry, it was not my intention to hijack the thread ...

Tom, tell us about your setup ... Smiley Happy

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TomHowarth
Leadership
Leadership

fairly basic really, I am not one to over complicate things,

Single CPU, 2Gb RAM. however I do have three vmdks drives attached to the server, 2 RAID 5 and one RAID1 for the logs.

I might increase the RAM in the server, pending preformance tests.

it is a fairly small set up only 100 users, and is still in pilot, but it appears to be holding up fine.

there is not much else on the host vm either, just a couple of VDI desktops. the other host in the cluster in hosting the SQL server, We are going to be running a test failover and run to see what preformance is over the next week of two, when one server is hosting all the servers.

I'll keep you posted.

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
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cheeko
Expert
Expert

Tom, how are your Exchange VMs running so far?

Anything remarkable?

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TomHowarth
Leadership
Leadership

I must admit, I am rather suprised at the preformance. considering the Microsoft FUD that has been scattered around. Admittedly the site is small, 100 email users, but they are more than happy, their mail is flowing and performance is better than their old 2000 exchange environment.

the guests are 64bit single proc, 3Gb memory (started with 2Gb) with three partitions, System (20Gb), Logs (Raid1 LUN) 200Gb (Raid5 LUN).

They have been live for a week now, exmerged there old mail boxes in. contary to believe exchage power-shell commands will not get mail from a 2000 server based mail enironment. nice warning message about needing a server at version 5.2 and yours is 5.0. as 2000 exchange will not run on 2003, that sort of scupped an easy migration. but that was the only hicicup.

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
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Brian_Olivier
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,

I have an ESX 3.01 with dual AMD Opteron 248 (Stepping E) and 8GB of RAM. I have installed Exchange 2007 (hub, client, mailbox) in one VM and Edge in another.

I also run a seperate VM for DC, SMS server, ISA, Vista and Linux Debian and yes it all works.

However quite some issues with performance which I have to sort out, so I am not quite there yet.

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emporio
Contributor
Contributor

just to make sure Smiley Happy,

you installed Exchange 2007 64bit?

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citrix_guy
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

>Looks like VMware is interested:

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

>I personally feel that MS is not supporting other products to ensure FUD in the marketplace. It is the only way they can slow VMware as they currently do not have any products that compete with VI3..... well ESX for that matter!

Yeah, we wrote that paper... expect an update in the future, but 2007 (running now as a VM in the lab fo the guy that wrote that paper) runs great.

Ron

just some guy...
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jurajfox
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Exchange 32bit won't install on a x64 bit OS. At least Exchange 2003 didn't.

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Leo_Smith
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I guess i sort of started this thread and have been keeping up with it. The real question is to people like Tom Howarth[/b] who have implemented it. How is it working now and have you had any problems? Looks like you have had it up for more than a week now Tom. How do you like it ? Is any one else in production? I am looking at a small implementation but it is still about 5x of Tom's.

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JoPatel
Contributor
Contributor

Note that while the current edition of Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server do not support 64-bit guest operating systems, third-party virtual machine host software such as VMware Server does. You must ensure that your processor's virtualization extensions are enabled when attempting to run 64-bit guest operating systems.

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