HyperVoria | Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments

Posted by Bink on on August 20 2008, 9:44 AM with 1 comment(s)

the Microsoft support policies for running currently supported versions of Microsoft Exchange Server in production in a hardware virtualization environment. This topic also provides recommendations for running Exchange Server in production in a hardware virtualization environment.

Hardware virtualization software enables you to run multiple, separate operating systems concurrently on a single physical machine. Microsoft has the following three software offerings that provide hardware virtualization functionality:

• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Technology/Microsoft Hyper-V Server   Windows Server 2008 provides 64-bit virtualization technology called Hyper-V. Hyper-V is a hypervisor: a layer of software that sits just above the hardware and beneath one or more operating systems. For more information about Hyper-V, see Virtualization and Consolidation with Hyper-V.
  
• Microsoft Virtual Server   Virtual Server is software that provides server virtualization technology that was engineered for the Windows Server System platform (Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2). For more information about Microsoft Virtual Server, see the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Product Overview.
  
• Microsoft Virtual PC   Virtual PC is software that lets you create separate virtual machines on your Microsoft Windows desktop, each of which virtualizes the hardware of a physical computer. For more information about Virtual PC, see Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Product Information.
  

Third parties also provide hardware virtualization functionality. For details about the Microsoft support policy for third-party hardware virtualization software, see:

• Updated support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software environments
• Support partners for non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software

Microsoft supports Exchange Server 2007 in production on hardware virtualization software only when all the following conditions are true:

• The hardware virtualization software is Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology, Microsoft Hyper-V Server, or any third-party hypervisor that has been validated under the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program.
  
• The Exchange Server guest virtual machine:
  
  • Is running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later.
    
  • Is deployed on the Windows Server 2008 operating system.
    
  • Does not have the Unified Messaging server role installed. All Exchange 2007 server roles, except for the Unified Messaging role, are supported in a virtualization environment.
    
• The storage used by the Exchange Server guest machine can be virtual storage of a fixed size (for example, fixed virtual hard drives (VHDs) in a Hyper-V environment), SCSI pass-through storage, or Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage. Pass-through storage is storage that is configured at the host level and dedicated to one guest machine.
  

  Note:
  In a Hyper-V environment, each fixed VHD must be less than 2,040 gigabytes (GB). For supported third-party hypervisors, check with the manufacturer to see if any disk size limitations exist.

  • Virtual disks that dynamically expand are not supported by Exchange.
    
  • Virtual disks that use differencing or delta mechanisms (such as Hyper-V's differencing VHDs or snapshots) are not supported.
    
• No other server-based applications, other than management software (for example, antivirus software, backup software, virtual machine management software, etc.) can be deployed on the physical root machine. The root machine should be dedicated to running guest virtual machines.
  
• Microsoft does not support combining Exchange clustering solutions (namely, cluster continuous replication (CCR) and single copy clusters (SCC)) with hypervisor-based availability or migration solutions (for example, Hyper-V's quick migration). Both CCR and SCC are supported in hardware virtualization environments provided that the virtualization environment does not employ clustered virtualization servers.
  
• Some hypervisors include features for taking snapshots of virtual machines. Virtual machine snapshots capture the state of a virtual machine while it is running. This feature enables you to take multiple snapshots of a virtual machine and then revert the virtual machine to any of the previous states by applying a snapshot to the virtual machine. However, virtual machine snapshots are not application-aware, and using them can have unintended and unexpected consequences for a server application that maintains state data, such as Exchange Server. As a result, making virtual machine snapshots of an Exchange guest virtual machine is not supported.
  
• Many hardware virtualization products allow you to specify the number of virtual processors that should be allocated to each guest virtual machine. The virtual processors located in the guest virtual machine share a fixed number of logical processors in the physical system. Exchange supports a virtual processor-to-logical processor ratio no greater than 2:1. For example, a dual processor system using quad core processors contains a total of 8 logical processors in the host system. On a system with this configuration, do not allocate more than a total of 16 virtual processors to all guest virtual machines combined.
  

Performance and Scalability Considerations

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