Email servers are a business-critical component of IT systems implementations and Exchange Server is one of the most ubiquitous of them. As such, we wanted to see how we could leverage Virtual SAN to bring new technology in serving the storage needs of this application. We administered some tests to see how Exchange Server would perform on Virtual SAN. We ran five Virtual SAN servers, and each server hosted two virtual machines with the Exchange Server roles Mailbox and HUB. The first host had an added virtual machine for the AD Server role. A client virtual machine on a separate host ran the load generator.
Benchmarks are an important part of performance testing—we used Exchange Load Generator to simulate, for Exchange Server, users sending and receiving email. Then we measured the Sendmail latency of these requests for the average and 95th-percentile for three separate loads of 12,000 users, 16,000 users, and 20,000 users. This shows how Virtual SAN can accommodate the storage needs from additional users and be flexible for scaling out.
The results are shown in the following figure. The industry-standard measure of good latency is anything below 500ms. As shown here, the Sendmail latency is well below 500ms for both the average and 95th-percentile.
For more information, read the paper here.