[GRLUG] VMWare ESXi Was: Raid, LVM, and Cheap Storage

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> I agree with you, I am avoiding virtualizing Exchange 2007 and any
> 2008 products until they are tried and tested - you would be smart to
> hold off on exchange, besides most exchange servers have fairly high
> resource requirements on a continual basis, so a dedicated box isn't
> all bad.
> We and MANY MANY MANY hosted exchange and hosted database companies
> run both exchange 2003, 2007, and sql 2005 in virtual environments.

Interesting, I though Exchange in a VM was pretty common.  At a recent
tech expo in GR, hosted by Trivalent, it seemed like the majority of
people had done it or were headed that way.  I talked to at least two
who had virtualized Exchange.

And there certainly are write-ups about it:
<http://www.vmware.com/pdf/exchange_esx25_wp_eng.pdf>
<http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps4q07-20080147-Muirhead.pdf>

I'm curious what makes Exchange a particularly bad VM candidate?  Is it
simply the I/O load?   Although I don't host Exchange I read a fair
number of Exchange articles in order to harvest ideas for OpenGroupware
and just because it is an interesting product.  It seems that current
versions of Exchange can be installed modularly, with different units on
different hosts;  could it potentially make sense to virtualize some
components of Exchange (such as hub transport or unified messaging) and
not others (such as the mailbox server)?

I've not virtualized either of my two database servers (1 Informix and 1
PostgreSQL) for that [I/O] reason.  It just didn't make sense;
especially since both support point-in-time restore, etc... on their
own.  I was concerned about Cyrus IMAPd in a VM with the meta-data spool
on iSCSI, but so far it seems to work well (probably because cache rates
are VERY high).

> We have quite a few SQL 2005 virtualized instances - developers love
> it, and there is no reason not to do it.

I've got one M$-SQL instance in a VM from an app used by a company my
employer assimilated.  But it is so tiny as to be irrelevant.

> Oh you want to try and work on the (name here) database while your in
> Arizona? here just take server with you ... (done) 

So cool!  I still find that awesome.

> And Microsoft did publish an article on considerations... so if you
> follow that you should be in their (albeit unsupported) good graces.
> http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/virtenviron.mspx
> SQL 2003 works great hosted on VM Server 1.06, 2.0, ESX, and ESXi - so
> you should be fine any way you go about it.