Exchange 2013 - VMware Setup

[rpettit]

We are currently running exchange 2013 on-premise within VMware vSphere 5.5

 

We are currently using 1 vCPU and 10GB of RAM. The VMware host has dual 4-core Intel Xeon processors.

 

What is your setup? Should I increase the number of vCPU's to improve performance? Or are there any additional VMware tweaks that can be made to improve server performance?

 

Many Thanks

[jamesb]

I've only run it on Hyper-V myself, but VMWare do have a best practice guide for Exchange 2013 which might help you: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Exchange_2013_on_VMware_Best_Practices_Guide.pdf

[rpettit]

I've seen the best practice guide and found it really helpful...was looking for other admins real world setups.

[mrbios]

Depends how many mailboxes etc you have as to what you need assigned.

 

I've got 4vCPU and 24gb ram assigned to mine with 2500-3000 mailboxes. 13.3gb ram in use currently but it was restarted yesterday, i tend to over do the ram as exchange tends to hammer disk usage if it runs out if i remember correctly (I think 2013 is more efficient in that sense than 2003, 2007 etc were though.)

[3s-gtech]

I gave mine 16 CPU cores and 32GB of RAM on a physical box. 1200 mailboxes here, and total overkill. I would give it 4 vcores though personally, quite a few processes ongoing.

[jamesb]

While it was on Hyper-V, we did find that 1 virtual processor and 8GB RAM was fine for ours. That was a small server though.

 

Your best bet is to set up resource monitoring, and see whether or not it actually appears constrained at any time. Do you have any performance issues? If not, then it's probably fine.

[rpettit]

Do you tend to run 4 vCPU per VM or is this an exception for exchange? Edited October 30, 2014 by rpettit