Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Virtualizing
Exchange Best
Practices
Scott Salyer
VMware, Inc.
#vmworldapps
Disclaimer
Agenda
Design Requirements
Number of mailboxes
Growth over next X years
Mailbox tiers
Quota, activity, deleted item retention, etc
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Requirements
1 site, high availability using DAG and vSphere HA
10,000 heavy users (2GB quota, 150 messages/mbx/day)
Dedicated mailbox role, combined client access and hub transport servers
Option 21:
(3)
(2) DAG nodes (54%
(77% utilized during failover)
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8 vCPU, 64GB
128GB
Sufficient
CPU and Memory
resources
overcommitted
for peripheral during
services
host failure
Support for Exchange has evolved drastically over the last two
years leading to confusion and misconceptions
What is Supported?
Virtualization of all server roles, including Unified Messaging with Exchange
2010 SP1
Not Supported?
NAS Storage for Exchange files (mailbox database, HT queue, logs)
Thin virtual disks
Virtual machine snapshots (what about backups?)
MS TechNet Understanding Exchange 2010 Virtualization:
(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj126252)
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Virtual CPUs
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Hyper-threading Confusion
So, do I or dont I?
4 Core / 32 GB
NUMA Node 1
NUMA Node 2
NUMA Interconnect
Memory Bank 1
4 vCPU/32 GB
Within NUMA Node
Memory Bank 2
6 vCPU/48 GB
Beyond NUMA Node
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NUMA Considerations
The following recommendations should be followed whenever possible to
ensure the best performance on systems that support NUMA:
Make sure the NUMA architecture is enabled in the BIOS. On many systems
enabling NUMA is achieved by disabling Node Interleaving (typically default)
When possible size Exchange virtual machines so that the amount of vCPUs
and memory does not exceed the number of cores and memory in a single
NUMA node
The size of a NUMA node is not always the number of cores on a chip, for
example; AMD Magny Cours place two six-core chips in a single die/socket
Avoid using CPU affinity features in vSphere, as this can circumvent the NUMA
architecture and reduce performance.
13
Virtual Memory
Best Practices
Avoid memory over-commitment
Only use memory reservations to avoid over-commitment, guarantee
available physical memory, or to reclaim VM swap file space.
Right-size the configured memory of a VM.
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StripeUnitSize
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VMDK or RDM?
Next Slide
VMFS
management
VMFS
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VMFS
VMFS
NFS
Not supported for Exchange data (databases or logs) or shared-disk MSCS
configs (it works great, but consider support implications)
In-guest iSCSI
Supported for DAG database storage
Facilitates easy storage zoning and access masking
Useful for minimizing number of LUNs zoned to an ESXi host
Offloads storage processing resources away from ESXi hosts
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Networking
Best Practices
vSphere Distributed Switch or Standard vSwitch?
Choice is yours, but distributed switches require less management overhead
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Single vSwitch
using VLAN
trunking to
separate traffic
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Physical
Separation using
multiple vSwitches
and physical NICs
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Rules:
Separate VMs
VMs to Hosts
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Backups
Software VSS
Wide third party adoption
Flexible configuration support
Hardware VSS
Storage array level protection, either full clones or snapshots
Storage vendor provides VSS integration
Most solutions require physical mode raw-device mappings (unless using inguest attached iSCSI)
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Take Aways
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Virtualizing
Exchange Best
Practices
Scott Salyer
VMware, Inc.
#vmworldapps