exchange 2007 best practices

[kfkehua]

We're considereing deploying exchange 2007 on a Win2k3 x64. Our environment is esx 3.5.

Are there any "best practiceses" or things i should be aware of when implementing Exchange in a virtual session?? Any of you have any experience with this setup??

Thanks a lot.

[Troy_Clavell]

I don't have Exchange running in a virtual enviornment, but you may want to take a look at this link

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[khughes]

The link Troy provided is a good source to go off of. We don't run 2007, but 2003 exchange but the practices should be about the same, along with using best practices for VM's in general. Exchange setup also goes hand in hand on how big your exchange is going to be. We have around 150 mailboxes but our server rarely takes a hit. Right now it is way over commited hardware wise with 2 vCPU and 2GB ram. If I had it my way I would chop that server down to 1 vCPU and it would probably run faster... Only issue we've ever run in with is someone snapshotted our exchange and it caused some data corruption.

• Kyle

[Craig_Baltzer]

If you want to go down the "fully MS Supported" route then you'll need to run on Windows 2008 rather than Windows 2003 if you're virtualizing Exchange 2007. Lots of people running E2K7 on W2K3 virtualized (us included) but if you have the option I'd go W2K8...

If you'll be virtaulizing the mailbox role, then have a go at a little planning with the Exchange 2007 Storage Calculator to figure out how to plan out your storage and the required IOPS, then run JetStress on your VM configuration to verify that you'll have the performance you'll need....