Sizing, Best Practices: MS Exchange 2010, VMware vSphere and EqualLogic

Many IT organizations are looking to move to Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 to take advantage of its performance, reliability and scalability innovations. At the same time, they are continuing to improve the efficiency and availability of enterprise applications through data center virtualization architectures. For example, the release of VMware® vSphere™ 4.1 includes functional enhancements that improve the integration and performance of storage area networks (SANs).

To achieve optimal use of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010's mailbox resiliency features, it is critical that your database storage infrastructure be properly designed and sized to meet storage and I/O (input/output) performance requirements. Read on to get valuable sizing guidance and best practices, based on tests conducted by Dell Labs, for designing and deploying Microsoft Exchange 2010 hosted by VMware vSphere 4.1 running on Dell™ PowerEdge™ blade servers and Dell EqualLogic™ SANs.

This paper also provides generalized storage sizing formulas for planning storage requirements, and an example reference configuration for supporting a 5,000-user Exchange environment.