Exchange 2013 Virualised

[truebluesteve]

Hello Folks

 

Our existing Exchange Server 2007 is coming to the end of its useful life in its current roll due to age. It would seem an ideal opportunity to move up to Exchange 2013 and in a virtualised environment. So my questions are -

 

1. Any issues with the above proposed setup?

 

2. Thoughts on Exchange 2013 as a whole?

 

I had considered migrating the whole thing to O365 but if I can virtualise it, then in terms of cost (which isn't a deciding factor anyway) there isn't an awful lot in it, and I'm like the control and speed of internal email that we have currently. I would also need some good reasons to convince SLT to have it hosted.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Steve

[zag]

I would recommend Office 365 over an exchange server any day.

 

I'm not sure why anyone would keep this onsite these days but virtualizing it is the best idea if you do.

 

Office 365 is faster than our old internal server and you have the same control through Powershell.

[truebluesteve]

I can see the pro's for hosted Exchange servers, and for commercial organisations or schools without the funds or expertise to set up Exchange its probably a no-brainer. However given our existing setup it doesn't have the same appeal although I haven't discounted the option completely.

 

We have the spare capacity on our VM hardware to do the virtualisation, but I wondered if others had encountered any issues that were worth sharing

[dhicks]

We have the spare capacity on our VM hardware to do the virtualisation, but I wondered if others had encountered any issues that were worth sharing

 

We've had no problems with our Exchange 2010 server being virtualised, it's been running for a couple of years now with no problems. Probably a good idea to give it a decent wodge of RAM, it will happily use all you assign it - I think ours is currently on 10GB.

[timbo343]

What ever you give exchange in terms of RAM it will just eat it. We still have a physical exchange 2010 box and i originally had 12Gb RAM in it.. it ate that... then increased it to 28Gb... its eaten that too.

[clareq]

We recently ran a trial version of an Exchange monitoring program - I think it was ManageEngine, and the reports from there showed that 80% of our mail is internal. I can think of no good reason to send all that mail out to the Internet to bring it back in again. At least with an internal mail server if the Internet goes down mail will still flow.

[zag]

We recently ran a trial version of an Exchange monitoring program - I think it was ManageEngine, and the reports from there showed that 80% of our mail is internal. I can think of no good reason to send all that mail out to the Internet to bring it back in again. At least with an internal mail server if the Internet goes down mail will still flow.

 

We found the opposite that if the internet goes down people could still use Office365 to send emails on their mobile phones

[cpjitservices]

We have Hosted Exchange due to the nature of the company we can't use 365, we have it Virtualized and I will warn Exchange is a RAM hungry beast.

[truebluesteve]

I take the point about Exchange being memory hungry - our 2007 server seems to run happily on 8GB RAM although I don't know whether this changes drastically depending on the number of mailboxes. We only host staff on Exchange so have around 300 mailboxes at the moment.

 

Anything that employs SQL server seems to eat all the memory you give it without any noticeable performance benefits - SIMS is a prime example!

[CapnPugwash]

We've had no problems with our Exchange 2010 server being virtualised, it's been running for a couple of years now with no problems. Probably a good idea to give it a decent wodge of RAM, it will happily use all you assign it - I think ours is currently on 10GB.

 

Same here, Exchange 2010. Virtualised a couple of years ago. No problems at all

[bdmichalski]

We have Exchange 2010 running in Vmware. Runs like a champ. Nowadays I wouldn't do anything bare-metal unless I absolutely had to, but that is another discussion.

[3s-gtech]

Hosted Exchange here - our internet connection is not reliable enough and we don't want to keep any school data on other people's servers just yet. Not virtualised - we set up Exchange 2013 from scratch on a powerful bare metal host (4 quad core CPUs, 32GB RAM, twin RAID 10 arrays). Don't see why it wouldn't virtualise though, we are a big school so didn't want to risk throttling it. It was a lot of work to set up, but not overly difficult - just lots of PS commands to run, GUIs to navigate etc. I like the software a lot.

[visioN]

Exchange 2010 automatically takes near all the RAM, then if the system needs memory for anything else it releases it.

 

Whichever route you chose just plan your back-up and DR accordingley... if you virtualize it, sort out Veeam for example. If you put it on it's own physical box plan how will you back it up etc.

 

There isn't a one size fits all... hosted exchange may work for one organization but won't for another.