mattx Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 Quick Exchange Server Question: Is there any reason why you should not run Exhange as a Virtual Server / Machine. [ I don't think there is but..... ] Thanks.
bodminman Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 Don't know but we have Exchange 2010 running on XenServer and it works a treat! 1
teejay Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 Exchange 2010 can be run on any virtualisation platform that is validated by Microsft, see list here You do occaisionally get some jobsworth at Microsoft SUpport saying it's only supported on Hyper-V, if you do then ask to speak to their supervisor... 1
Theblacksheep Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 (edited) Exchange 2010 running on VMware ESX4.1 here. Two servers (4gb ram each, 2vcpu) 1 mailbox and 1 cas/hub. 300 staff and 2000 students (students have very restricted mailboxes). CAS uses most ram and I could do with using 6-8GB for this. No dynamic disks. UM cannot be virtual. Edited January 20, 2011 by Theblacksheep 1
mattx Posted January 20, 2011 Author Posted January 20, 2011 Thanks - that's another tick in the box for me when it comes to future developments.
chrisbrown Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 I know this has mostly been covered, but let me say that Exchange 2010 is very supported in a VM environment. Microsoft have strayed away from many other software vendors' approaches here. Microsoft support and even provide assistance with getting Exchange up and running in VMs. Because of the dynamic resource allocation and availability advantages of virtualisation, MS would be mad not to support it. There are even several extensive documents detailing the best way to get this up and running. In fact, provided with the opportunity again, I would be running HyperV on my primary Exchange 2010 box and have one or two VMs on there, purely for the ease of backup and availability. Hope this helps, please let me know if you need any more information. 1
glennda Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 Exchange works well in a VM enviroment you just need to remember that exchange loves Ram and will eat as much as you will give it - both mine currently sit eating around 9gb of ram and thats just the Information Store. but each server has around 900 user accounts on T 1
chrisbrown Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 Exchange works well in a VM enviroment you just need to remember that exchange loves Ram and will eat as much as you will give it - both mine currently sit eating around 9gb of ram and thats just the Information Store. but each server has around 900 user accounts on T As you can see...this particular server is using 14GB for the IS, with only 57 mailboxes. We're currently on our annual holiday, so only 4 of these mailboxes are in use at present. Exchange IS will take whatever it can. This box has 24GB of RAM, and is a dual 6-core xeon. 1
glennda Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 As you can see...this particular server is using 14GB for the IS, with only 57 mailboxes. We're currently on our annual holiday, so only 4 of these mailboxes are in use at present. Exchange IS will take whatever it can. This box has 24GB of RAM, and is a dual 6-core xeon. someones budget is way to big! 24gb is slight over kill for 57 mailboxes!! and I know exchange likes eating ram - which i why i said it as it will keep eating it forcing other things to start using the pagefile which will in turn slow it down slightly if running as a vm using a san as it will not be able to read/write to the pagefile as quickly as it could with ram. EDIT: enless the server has other roles!
chrisbrown Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 someones budget is way to big! 24gb is slight over kill for 57 mailboxes!! and I know exchange likes eating ram - which i why i said it as it will keep eating it forcing other things to start using the pagefile which will in turn slow it down slightly if running as a vm using a san as it will not be able to read/write to the pagefile as quickly as it could with ram. EDIT: enless the server has other roles! Exchange is all it does. 57 is my staging count, it will soon have over 2000 mailboxes on it. My concern is that CAS is going to become a pain, will probably throw a CAS array in our ESX environment down the track. Also: Pagefile = empty. I've never seen this box page anything, it's a dream.
rh91uk Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 We have run Exchange 2007 then 2010 all in virtual environments. Seems to work fine here! We do spread the roles across multiple exchange servers, though. 1
bodminman Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 Don't know but we have Exchange 2010 running on XenServer and it works a treat! Just for completeness our Exchange 2010 Server config is: XenServer (C:\ 40gb for the system / D:\ 100gb for the datastore - Currently using 20%) 4gb RAM x2 V-CPU 1000 mailboxes x7 mailbox databases 1
glennda Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 Exchange is all it does. 57 is my staging count, it will soon have over 2000 mailboxes on it. My concern is that CAS is going to become a pain, will probably throw a CAS array in our ESX environment down the track. Also: Pagefile = empty. I've never seen this box page anything, it's a dream. Your lucky with the pagefile - my server only has 12gb of ram in each of them. therefore 9gb store is pretty large considering and the pagefile is about 12gb! I have put in the budget for next year to up the server to 30gb of ram in each which should hopefully speed it up slightly although its not slow i would prefer for it not to have a 12gb page file!
Cools Posted January 24, 2011 Posted January 24, 2011 i'll stick with a Linux mail server. shame Cisco now owns PostPath "is a drop-in Microsoft Exchange alternative based on the open source Postfix MTA" i was cheaper and could sit on a old server..
glennda Posted January 24, 2011 Posted January 24, 2011 i'll stick with a Linux mail server. shame Cisco now owns PostPath "is a drop-in Microsoft Exchange alternative based on the open source Postfix MTA" i was cheaper and could sit on a old server.. have you looked at Zimbra?
chrisbrown Posted January 24, 2011 Posted January 24, 2011 i'll stick with a Linux mail server. shame Cisco now owns PostPath "is a drop-in Microsoft Exchange alternative based on the open source Postfix MTA" i was cheaper and could sit on a old server.. Having adminned (to a certain extent) both Postfix and Exchange, I must say Exchange is a much friendlier service, and is much more extensible. I don't know about you, but I don't recall Postfix (or the *n*x world) ever offering a suitable alternative to DAGs and MAPI integration for Outlook...
mattx Posted January 24, 2011 Author Posted January 24, 2011 Talking of Zimbra...... Anyone using this alongside Outlook etc ?
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