HP released a new whitepaper for small and midsize businesses that are planning to deploy and virtualize Exchange on HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Servers and HP MSA 2040 Storage.
The solution allows the use of the Exchange mailbox resiliency database availability group (DAG) feature with the high-availability features of the HP MSA 2040 Storage; providing hardware efficiency and high availability for Exchange users.
The solution design is a virtualized Exchange environment supporting 750 mailboxes in a resiliency configuration across two sites (primary site and disaster recovery site).
The solution is based on HP Proliant DL380 Gen8 servers, HP MSA 2040 storage and StoreFabric SN1000E 16Gb Host Bus Adapters.
It uses a single DAG to support 750 mailboxes, each with a 5 GB mailbox capacity and a work profile of 200 messages sent and received for each user, each day, with additional performance and capacity overhead included. To provide mailbox resiliency, there are four copies of each database; two copies located at the primary site and two copies located at the disaster recovery site.
The DAG contains four mailbox servers (two at the primary site and two at the disaster recovery site), with each mailbox server configured as a virtual machine. Each virtual machine resides on its own hypervisor, using the virtualization features of Microsoft Hyper-V. The solution eliminates a single point of failure situation and handles the loss of a storage array, hypervisor server, mailbox server virtual machine, database volume, host bus adaptor (HBA), or switch. For example, during a mailbox server failure or maintenance operation, each mailbox server can handle the compute and storage requirements of all 750 mailboxes.
You can download the whitepaper here.