Exchange 2010 storage \ virtualisation

[tarquel]

Finally replied to ya PM Thought I had already replied in some way but i guess not.

Wrote a huge one, and then for no reason i can see (seeing as i didnt actually touch anything) the browser refreshed and i lost me "not so quick" Quick Reply hehe

So many different ways u can keep the data safe in Exchange 2010 natively that it wont be a problem, minus some huge meteor type disaster like you say, but then, i think the data wont matter a jot if something like that happened

DAG with Passive copies is awesome btw...

I've spotted a few posts on the dual HA unsupported configuration, I think I'll probably stick with the VMWare HA to cover loss of a host as the DAGs don't help much if the SAN they're all sitting on is the part that fails

...and yes, quite true (tho ESXi-level HA has no bearing on Exchange Sukh - i,e. there are no multiple copies of VM's or anything like that if thats what you were wondering that would definately not be supported by MS indeed )...and yes, like Sukh said, you can also make a lagged copy mailbox server which would be ideal if the SAN exploded for example or killed all the data on your iSCSI LUN's hooked into your exchange VM's. So ideal idea there would be a physical server with JBOD, and setup as a lagged MBX, or even a member of the DAG that only stores the passive copies.

All this and having the dumpster and deleted items / mailbox retentions (at the db lvl) sorted, you've pretty much got it all covered

Nath

[sukh]

@nathan - What if an email is deleted after your dumpster limit and you want to recover. For this reason you still need backups. Sure you can restore an email from tape, but ideally you would want to recover within 30mins-1hr. So I think backups are still critical if you want email recovery within your RTO/RPO.

Again, is you have a site failure and it's acceptable to the school then yes, don't bother with a DR site, just ensure your school is aware of that. Or you can go to the clould which has benefits or have a mix of cloud and on-premise.

It really depends if email is critial or not and what loss/downtime is acceptable.

In terms of Virtual supprt, I was referring to the below

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../aa996719.aspx

Sukh

[tarquel]

@nathan - What if an email is deleted after your dumpster limit and you want to recover. For this reason you still need backups. Sure you can restore an email from tape, but ideally you would want to recover within 30mins-1hr. So I think backups are still critical if you want email recovery within your RTO/RPO.

I wasnt disputing it.... aka what i said "All this and having the dumpster...."

I was merely (in a rushed form perhaps) celebrating the fact that Exch 2010 certainly gives you pretty much as much scope and varied options to cater for pretty much all eventualities

In terms of Virtual supprt, I was referring to the below

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../aa996719.aspx

Some of that isnt quite that accurate IMO. Havent the time to go into why at the moment but I think they wrote much of the virtualization part / Hypervisor part with either only Hyper-V / older non-MS Hypervisors in mind, and/or SAN level LUN/Vol snapshots

Dealling with the aftermath of a site wide network outage so you'll forgive my lack of details here

[JoskosSolutions]

I will PM you

Garsh

[sukh]

@JoskosSolutions - PM who?

[JoskosSolutions]

Apologies, I should have directed my 'PM' intention to gshaw.

Thanks

Garsh

[sukh]

@JoskosSolutions - What are your thoughts on this topic? Anything to add?

Sukh

[JoskosSolutions]

We've had Exchange 2010 running on vSphere 4.1 VMs with EQL SAN (15K SAS) and no problems, performance is great. I've also seen 2010 running on SATA storage in RAID5 and again, no complaints. I imagine all SAN hardware of this class shows little discernable performance difference if spec'd adequately and paired with decent back-end network gear and servers.

So long as you're covered by a reliable backup solution, Veeam seems great, you're laughing. DR-wise, cloud-based services are the way to go if you don't have multiple sites, though I've seen nearby schools work together to host each other's (encrypted) data, is that something you've considered?

[sukh]

@JoskosSolutions - Have you benchmarked SAN's if so what ones? Do you have any baseline on performance on the SAN's you recommend? Any tested performance metrics you can share.

I agree cloud is the way to go depending on the env, for school this seems a good approach or a mixture as stated (on-premise/cloud).

Even with Veeam - Have you managed to restore data after the dumpster within a reasonable tme frame? (depends on RPO/RTO obviously).

Also, using another school as a DR site can be a good idea, however, there will be some serious costs involved, maybe cloud would be better in terms of what id offeref, enterprise data centres.

Another reason why the government is doing the Building schhols for future etc...

[tarquel]

We've had Exchange 2010 running on vSphere 4.1 VMs with EQL SAN (15K SAS) and no problems, performance is great.

4.0 here with EQL SAN SATA "SUMO" soon to update to 4.1, with new hosts replacing the existing hosts (R810's in place of R710's) and have some more EQL SAN's in the EQL cluster of the site

[note: not upgrading the above due to Exch performance - as that has been great from the virtually empty SAN to the very very full san / vSphere infrastructure - its just we have ALOT more on this particular setup besides Exchange 2010 ]