Virtualizing Microsoft® Exchange® Server 2007 on Dell™ Systems Running VMware® ESX

In a virtualized environment, Exchange users can consolidate multiple Exchange Server Mailbox roles on a single physical server to take advantage of unused CPU cycles or available memory. Additional Exchange Server roles (Hub Transport or Client Access Server) can be hosted on virtual machines (VM) and consolidated on the same hardware to reduce costs. Benefits of running Exchange in a virtualized environment will depend on the customer environment. Some of the advantages of virtualizing Exchange 2007 Server are:

• Cost savings thru server hardware consolidation
• Reducing performance bottlenecks by moving Mailbox VMs to systems with available CPU cycles
• Easier management of Exchange systems and infrastructure

In this paper a sample configuration is presented which is tested and validated to meet the performance and stability requirements of an enterprise Exchange deployment. This sample configuration is scalable and can be used as a building block for larger scale deployments. By deploying Exchange 2007 Server on ESX environment hosted on Dell Servers and EqualLogic iSCSI SAN, organizations can reduce the management complexity and improve utilization of hardware resources by consolidating on fewer hardware resources.

See also:

• Virtualizing and Consolidating Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 using VMware ESX