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

[Bruce Smith]

> 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.

In fact Exchange 2007 requires 64bit Windows.  It will not run on 32bit.

> 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?

They admitted that Exchange seems to run fine when virtualized, but
they said it's not officially supported by Microsoft.  That was enough
to kill the idea here.

We're also playing it safe and will be installing Exchange 2007 on
Windows server 2003, not Windows server 2008.  They said there were a
couple minor issues running Exchange on Win2008, but they didn't go
into the details.

> 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.

FWIW, we're installing the mailbox server role on it's own server.
Hub Transport and Client Access roles will go together on a second
server.  We're not installing Unified Messaging at this time, but will
plan on adding it sometime later.

Our Edge Transport role is also a separate box, but will not be
running Exchange.  Instead our consultant recommended Trend Micro
IMSS.  I have it installed and running on SLES 10 filtering a test
domain to a test postfix mail server, and so far I'm less than
impressed (to be nice).  We may be going back to a better solution we
used previously (hopefully!).

 - BS