The VMware Performance Team recently released a couple of technical whitepapers about a virtual deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on vSphere.
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Performance on VMware vSphere – Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, is a resource-hungry 64-bit application that has reduced storage demands as compared to previous versions. But its increased use of memory and heavier CPU load requires efficient virtualization capabilities to meet customer demands. This paper will detail experiments that demonstrate the efficient performance and scalability of Exchange when running inside a virtual machine on a VMware vSphere™ 4 environment.
- VMware vSphere 4: Exchange Server on NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel – In this paper, a large installation of 16,000 Exchange users was configured across eight virtual machines (VMs) on a single VMware vSphere™ 4 server. The performance of this configuration was measured when using storage supporting Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS storage protocols. The results show that each protocol achieved great performance with Fibre Channel leading the way, with iSCSI and NFS following closely behind.