Many organizations today rely on some degree of virtualization to reduce costs, improve agility, and enhance business continuity. Whether it is a few virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical computer or an entire data center with hundreds of physical servers, and thousands of VMs. Virtualization brings tremendous benefits to data centers through server consolidation, ease of provisioning and deployment, and the standardization of hardware. The resulting reduction in data center equipment and associated operational costs yields significant savings-including less management, smaller space requirements, and lower energy consumption for both power and cooling. For this reason, data centers are witnessing rapid adoption and proliferation of VMs in their IT infrastructure.
Historically, messaging has not been among applications that are commonly virtualized. Yet, virtualizing Exchange can be a cost-effective way to implement a flexible messaging architecture that delivers higher service levels and enables mailboxes to be scaled simply and dynamically. Virtualization decouples virtual and physical resources, thereby enabling the sharing of server resources previously dedicated to individual applications.
Microsoft® officially supports Windows® Server and Microsoft Exchange Server running on VMware’s vSphere.1 VMware vSphere was the first hypervisor validated under Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), providing customers with cooperative support from Microsoft and VMware.
This reference configuration is a guideline for the planning and budgeting of your Exchange server hardware deployments. This solution details the server and storage requirements for supporting 4,000 mailbox users, each with a 2 GB mailbox capacity and a workload profile of 200 messages sent and received per user, per day. The servers and storage are sized to support Exchange 2010 in a virtualized environment using VMware’s vSphere 5.0. The solution combines the native data protection features of Exchange 2010 along with the HA benefits of the HP StoreVirtual 4500 G2.
Download the white paper here.