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

[Ben DeMott]

>
> 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.
>

It is fairly common, as I stated - A lot of people Virtualize exchange, and
as of Exchange 2003 SP2 - and that seems to be working well.
The reason I am holding off on 2008/2007 is two fold - First I'm curious to
see what changes are made in the first year/service pack, and I'm waiting to
upgrade network servers until we can go to an all 64bit infrastructure to
reap the benefits of a 64bit host and client architecture.
I can't speak to the technical reasons of exact negatives, other than the
fact that It's not really broken so I'm not going to change it quite yet -
its low on my priority list.
I know people are doing it and it's working correctly.

My friend who works at Alticor said they reviewed it, and decided against
virtualizing exchange 2007 - so there must be some compelling issues why not
to, I could ask him what the technical reasons were they decided against it
if you want.
Although Alticor is large enough it could be completely for political or
bureaucratic reasons.

I would be interested to hear  the reasons Bruce's consultant would cite for
not virtualizing exchange?

My statements of resource Load on exchange depend completely on your
organization and what services they use, and how many users they service,
you could have a very under utilized exchange server for all I know -
however on an average it is one of the more resource intensive applications
on any given business network, simply from the amount of data that is moved
around, and the connections / emails that are sent/received.
Per 1 email the average server receives 5.2 spam emails.

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 7:14 PM, Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org
> wrote:

>
> > 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.
>
>
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