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Exchange Server 2007 and Hyper-V

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While at TechEd IT Pro North America 2008, I also had the opportunity to attend Brent Alinger's session on Exchange Server 2007 and Hyper-V.  Brent is a Senior Test Lead on the Exchange Team at Microsoft, and he's leading our testing efforts around Hyper-V.

Brent described a number of terms, such as the Hyper-V root (which is the parent or the host machine), Hyper-V guest (which is the child or virtual machine), virtual hard disks (VHD), passthrough disks, fixed and dynamic disks, and virtual machine state files.  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. I'm part of the Exchange Virtualization Working Group and will be helping to deliver some of this content.
  • 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, Brent shared the following:

  • 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.

Brent 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 virtualization.  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 virtualizing.

It was a great session, and you can expect to hear a lot more about Exchange 2007 and Hyper-V over the coming months.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Virtualisation is great but it's not a "one size fits all" solution - some workloads just

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I caught this post up on my colleague's blog on Hyper-V and support for Exchange. http://blogs.technet.com/jkruse/archive/2008/06/27/hyper-v-is-here-what-about-exchange.aspx

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    On Scott Schnoll's weblog " Is this thing on? " Scott provides details on the support for

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Today, Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Has your forest/domain been prepped for OCS and/or Exchange? Microsoft Exchange 2007 Clustering and Continuous

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    PingBack from http://www.leedesmond.com/weblog/?p=359

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    This week month Jeffrey Rosen and Joel Stidley talk about Exchange Server 2007 Update Rollup 3, TechEd

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hello folks, I've just seen on the Is this thing on? blog about Hyper-V and Exchange Server 2007

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Finalmente è scoppiata l’estate………direi nel vero senso della parola, dato il caldo disumano che sta attanagliando

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    True to their word of releasing their official support statement within 60 days of the RTM of Hyper-V

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    In case you haven't heard the news, we have released Hyper-V into the wild.  In fact did you know