If you’re planning to run Exchange in a vSphere or Hyper-V environment, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. While Microsoft has certainly become much more lenient in supporting Exchange in virtual environments, there are still a few things that can make Exchange 2010 and virtualization a bit tricky:
- Thin provisioning. Don’t do it with Exchange 2010. Microsoft won’t support it.
- Network Attached Storage devices. Want to use NFS on a NAS for your virtualized Exchange 2010 environment? Forget it. Microsoft won’t support it.
- Snapshots. Want to use snapshots as a data protection mechanism for your Exchange 2010 databases? Not so fast! Because snapshots aren’t application consistent, Microsoft does not support them for recovery purposes.
- VM sizing. Initially, ignore Microsoft’s guidance and start small with your virtual machines and add resources as necessary. Bear in mind that the more CPUs you add to a VM, the higher the likelihood that you’ll ultimately run into CPU contention issues. That said, don’t be afraid to size your Exchange servers appropriately, even if that means adding 8 vCPUs.
- Unified messaging? Go for it! Microsoft guidance used to indicate that the UM role was not supported in a virtual environment. With the release of Exchange 2010 SP1, the UM role can now be run on any supported hypervisor.