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Preliminary Guidelines for Running Exchange Server 2007 on Hyper-V

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The Exchange product team is going to announce our preliminary strategy for Hyper-V and Exchange Server 2007 tomorrow at Tech-Ed. I posted my quick interpretation of what is coming.

Here are some quick notes you can reference:

  • 60-days post RTM of Hyper-V we will provide detailed support statement of support for Exchange Server 2007 hosted on Hyper-V
  • Disk Performance from Exchange 2007 on Hyper-V was shown to be almost the same
  • You can scale up from 1 to 4 virtual processor for Exchange 2007 on Hyper-V
  • Performance of Exchange Server 2007 has been tested to be around the same as physical (within 96%)

Areas not supported for Exchange Server 2007 running on Hyper-V:

  • Running Exchange Server 2007 on host OS with Exchange in guest OS
  • Hyper-V snapshotting or differencing disks not supported with Exchange 2007 guests
  • Oversubscribing to virtual processors not supported for Exchange Server 2007
  • Quick migration for Hyper-V not supported for Exchange Server 2007 unplanned failures
  • VHD disks cannot be more than 2TB in size
  • Hardware VSS not available with Exchange 2007 guests
  • UM role not supported as guest
  • 64-bit Windows Server 2003 guest OS - must be Windows Server 2008 64-bit guests only for Exchange 2007

Recommendations for running Exchange Server 2007 on Hyper-V:

  • All Exchange role HW planning should be done with same diligence as physical HW
  • Use dedicated spindles for Exchange storage and not same as guest OS spindle
  • FC or SCSI HBAs presented to host/root OS and presented as passthrough SCSI
  • With iSCSI, also use passthrough to guest OS and dedicated NIC to avoid virtual switch
  • Should not be used as a means to consolidate physical mailbox roles
  • CCR and SCC are being tested but not to be combined with Hyper-V quick migration
  • Plan for up to 2000 mailboxes per Exchange guest OS

Summary

Virtualization is certainly an area of interest to many schools but please wait until the official support guidance has been released by the Exchange product team before deploying production Exchange 2007 on Hyper-V even when it is released.

As far as mailbox server virtualization goes, if you can afford to put your mailbox role on a physical dedicated server this would be my personal recommendation going forward to avoid the additional layer of management of Hyper-V for Exchange administrators. I can see Hyper-V being used with Exchange 2007 for redundancy (redundant Hubs, CAS), small branch locations where a physical server doesn't make sense, etc. I could also potentially see this as a virtual SCR passive site if this is fully supported.

The Exchange team will provide us more scenario and use cases in the coming months.