MSExchange Team blogged yesterday about a hot topic which is virtualization and Exchange Server 2010. One of the highlights is described below where why Exchange High Availability is better than just virtualization HA.
Deploying for High Availability
VMware specifically recommends combining their VMware HA solution with the Exchange application-aware high availability solution, which is an unsupported configuration. It is important to note that VMware’s HA solution only protects from some hardware failures, while the Exchange high availability solution protects against both hardware and application failures (including a process for patching guest virtual machines). It is simply reckless for VMware to recommend customers deploy this configuration, while ignoring important Microsoft system requirements and unsupported scenarios. In addition, VMware also seems to gloss over the fact that combining these HA solutions will result in new storage requirements that increase cost and complexity. Considering that a significant focus of Exchange 2010 is reducing storage costs, promoting a strategy that increases storage costs isn’t consistent with our customers’ requirements.
There is nothing within the material that explains how combining Exchange database availability groups (DAGs) with VMware HA will provide a faster end-user mailbox recovery than using Exchange DAGs alone. Since Exchange HA protects against hardware and application failures, it is hard to imagine how VMware can provide a faster, and simpler solution than Exchange HA alone.
Microsoft does not support combining Exchange high availability (DAGs) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers. Microsoft recommends using Exchange DAGs to provide high availability, when deploying the Exchange Mailbox Server role. Because hypervisor HA solutions are not application aware, they cannot adapt to non-hardware failures. Combining these solutions adds complexity and cost, without adding additional high availability. On the other hand, an Exchange high availability solution does detect both hardware and application failures, and will automatically failover to another member server in the DAG, while reducing complexity.
Read more at source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/11/09/456851.aspx
Cheers,
Anderson Patricio
http://blogs.msexchange.org/patricio
Twitter: @apatricio
