We've had a number of customers ask us whether or not we support virtualized Exchange Server 2010 deployments. The answer is firmly, YES! We know there are many customers running on under-utilize...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
3 MIN READ
Answering Exchange Virtualization Questions and Addressing Misleading VMware Guidance
I think both vmware and Microsoft have valid points, but everything comes down to the SLA's, RPO's and RTO's.
If you have 100 people on an exchange, it can be down for 48 hours and you only are going to be recovering from last backup, then I think HA is a very good low cost solution for someone with a HA environment already built.
If, on the other hand, a company is running 1000 users and only rely's on HA and needs quick recovery from failure and data corruption, well then they would be idiots to only have a single server and think HA is going to help them when they bluescreen the O/S.
I thin Microsoft absolutely stating they do not support HA is a load of Crap. They better update their documents to ensure the ASR (as mentioned above) needs to be disabled on all Exchange 2010 servers since its 100% the same thing...Server goes down...Server starts up...simple as that.
Guess the solution is to just leave your server offline until you feel like pushing the button to start it up...but if you pay for twice the licensing, then you don't have to do that because you will have another node running.
I can understand not supporting DRS and vmotion if they want..thats fine...peg the VM to a single box...big deal.
Really it comes down to 2 things...Microsoft can only do HA with clustering so it has different limitation then vmware HA AND more importantly, if you don't pay for extra licensing to get those 2 exchange servers you hit microsoft in the pocketbook.
If you have 100 people on an exchange, it can be down for 48 hours and you only are going to be recovering from last backup, then I think HA is a very good low cost solution for someone with a HA environment already built.
If, on the other hand, a company is running 1000 users and only rely's on HA and needs quick recovery from failure and data corruption, well then they would be idiots to only have a single server and think HA is going to help them when they bluescreen the O/S.
I thin Microsoft absolutely stating they do not support HA is a load of Crap. They better update their documents to ensure the ASR (as mentioned above) needs to be disabled on all Exchange 2010 servers since its 100% the same thing...Server goes down...Server starts up...simple as that.
Guess the solution is to just leave your server offline until you feel like pushing the button to start it up...but if you pay for twice the licensing, then you don't have to do that because you will have another node running.
I can understand not supporting DRS and vmotion if they want..thats fine...peg the VM to a single box...big deal.
Really it comes down to 2 things...Microsoft can only do HA with clustering so it has different limitation then vmware HA AND more importantly, if you don't pay for extra licensing to get those 2 exchange servers you hit microsoft in the pocketbook.