VMware

Upgrade to the Best Platform for Microsoft Exchange

Run Exchange on VMware Infrastructure to maximize availability and protect against costly and disruptive email outages, increase infrastructure performance by 100% and reduce server footprint by up to 90%, scale dynamically to adapt to changing workloads, and expedite testing and provisioning. VMware Infrastructure is a dynamic, service-oriented platform that is officially supported by Microsoft and ideally suited to running Microsoft Exchange. Upgrade to VMware Infrastructure and free Exchange from the constraints of static physical infrastructure to:

  • Maximize availability without the complexity of Microsoft clustering
  • Increase the capacity of Exchange servers by 100%
  • Scale dynamically to support increasing load and eliminate sizing compromises
  • Expedite management tasks such as testing and provisioning
  • Reduce your infrastructure footprint and costs by up to 90%

Achieve Breakthrough Exchange Performance on VMware Infrastructure

Double the capacity of your Exchange infrastructure by scaling out your mailboxes and support the most demanding loads while keeping server sprawl under control. Leverage the highly scalable IO capabilities of VMware Infrastructure and the improved IO architecture of Exchange 2007 to achieve excellent performance of Exchange on VMware.

Leverage Advances in VMware and Exchange Performance

Microsoft Exchange 2007 includes architectural and performance improvements that significantly reduce the IO requirements as compared to Exchange 2003:

  • Cache increased from 900MB to multi-GB
  • 50% reduction in disk IO
  • Read / write ratio reduced to 1:1

At the same time, the performance and scalability of VMware ESX have improved dramatically over the latest product releases. ESX, is able to handle the most demanding workloads thanks to improvements such as:

  • Virtual Machine scalability increased to 4 vCPU and 64 GB of memory
  • ESX Disk IO scalability increased to 100,000 IOPS, enabling ESX to support IO-intensive applications such as Exchange and large Databases
  • ESX network IO increased to 9 Gbps

Increase the Capacity of Physical Servers by 100%

Double the number of mailboxes supported per physical host from 8,000 to 16,000 heavy mailbox users. Without VMware, a single Exchange mailbox running on a physical server can scale up to about 8,000 heavy user mailboxes. Using larger servers doesn’t help because the mailbox can’t leverage the additional capacity.

With VMware, Exchange mailboxes can be scaled out on multiple smaller virtual machines to maximize the throughput of the physical server. Using this approach, Exchange can be scaled out on 8 Virtual Machines, each supporting 2,000 heavy mailbox users, to support 16,000 users on one physical server.

This performance advantage will amplify over time with the introduction of larger multicore systems. Without VMware, Exchange will not be able to use the additional capacity of these servers. With VMware, Exchange will scale out linearly to efficiently use the additional capacity.

Next Steps

See why you will enjoy full Microsoft support for running Exchange on VMware.