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Hyper-V is here.. what about Exchange?

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In case you haven't heard the news, we have released Hyper-V into the wild.  In fact did you know that 25% of microsoft.com is already running on Hyper-V VMs?

So what about Exchange Server?

As we recently announced at Tech.Ed USA, Microsoft will be publishing a support statement with respect to Exchange Server on Hyper-V within 60 days of today.

Some of the more noteworthy bits of info from the session are:

  • Within 60 days of Hyper-V's RTM, the Exchange team will publish a detailed support statement for Hyper-V, and a TechNet article with best practices.
  • Customers should not deploy Exchange on Hyper-V until our support guidance is available.
  • Early results show that performance of Exchange 2007 on Hyper-V is quite good, and that it scales very well from 1-4 processors per VM.

In terms of best practices and requirements, the following guidance was released:

  • We're only supporting guests running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008.
  • We're only supporting fixed disks, and not dynamic disks.
  • Storage should be on spindles that are separate from the Guest operating system VHD physical storage.
  • Storage must be SCSI passthrough or iSCSI (with a preference of SCSI passthrough for queues, databases and log files).
  • All Exchange server roles, except for the Unified Messaging server role, will be supported.
  • There's a limit on VHD size of 2040 GB.

It was also mentioned that Hyper-V is a good fit when Exchange servers in branch offices cannot be consolidated to a central datacenter (for example, because of bandwidth or connectivity issues).

In terms of workload, not every workload is a candidate for virtualisation.  For example, server roles such as Client Access and Hub Transport can be good candidates, but a more heavy hitter like the Mailbox role (which often uses all available resources on a physical server) might not be the best candidate for virtualising.

So what's the really great thing about this soon-to-be-released guidance?

60 days from now is just in time for Tech.Ed Australia and New Zealand!!!

So of course will be doing a deep-dive on running Exchange 2007 SP1 on Hyper-V based on the official supported guidance :)

In Auckland this will be presented by Sandy Millar, Lead Architect in APAC for MCS; and in Sydney it will be presented by Mario Tevanian and Sander Valkhoff, lead Exchange consultants for MCS Australia.

So make sure you're there to hear all of the official guidance and advice.  The Auckland event is sold out, but there are still spaces left in Sydney.  Come on kiwis, jump on a plane and visit us in Sydney!  We've already committed to our USA speakers that the weather in Sydney will be perfect :)

(also, today (27th June) is the last day for early-bird registration which will save you $250!)

Register here for the Sydney event.

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