The wave of VMware customers looking to virtualize Exchange 2010 on vSphere continues to accelerate. While there have been customers who have chosen not to virtualize the DAG nodes, the reasons were not those we heard of in years past. Today it's not because of performance or high storage IO, in fact most customers believe that the majority of their applications can be virtualized, including their business critical applications. VMware customers who chose to postpone virtualization of their Exchange 2010 DAG nodes mostly did so for one reason: lack of support for vSphere advanced features from Microsoft. Those customers will be pleased to know that this is now a thing of the past.
With Microsoft's latest announcement of enhanced hardware virtualization support for Exchange 2010 customers looking to deploy a virtualized Exchange 2010 environment and take advantage of vSphere features such as vMotion, VMware HA and DRS can do so with full support from Microsoft and VMware. VMware has been officially supporting the use of these vSphere features along with Exchange 2010 DAGs for some time now, as described in our KB article here. The additional support by Microsoft simply validates what we've been promoting since the release of our Exchange 2010 on VMware documentation available here.
As news of this validation and support begins to pick up steam we anticipate that questions will come up as to what are the best practices for making sure your deployments are successful. To help provide our customers with some insight into using these features with their production Exchange 2010 DAG clusters we've put together a whitepaper outlining testing we performed in our labs earlier this year. The purpose of testing outlined in Using VMware HA, DRS and vMotion with Exchange 2010 DAGs was to:
- Validate the use case of combining VMware HA with Exchange DAGs to reduce the time required to re-establish DAG availability.
- Validate the use of vMotion with Exchange DAGs to allow the use of DRS and proactive workload migration while maintaining database availability and integrity.
- Provide guidance and best practices for taking advantage of these vSphere features.
The whitepaper can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/VMware-Using-HA-DRS-vMotion-with-Exchange-2010-DAGs.pdf
It shouldn't come as much surprise that the results we came up with and documented are in line with what Microsoft themselves are recommending, further validating our results. Additionally this whitepaper will provide guidance for customers looking to use features such as DRS to allow their vSphere environment to efficiently balance workloads and manage resources and VMware HA to provide even higher levels of availability.
This will no doubt begin driving up the number of virtualized DAGs out there, so help out your fellow vSphere and Exchange administrators. Join the Exchange, Domino and RIM VMware User Community!
-alex
Alex Fontana, Technical Solutions Architect
