Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange Server
By running Microsoft Exchange servers with VMware technology, you gain a whole set of management tools and distributed infrastructure services that can help make your Exchange roles more responsive to the ebb and flow of email traffic.
VMware technology can be particularly beneficial if you run Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on 64-bit hardware. Moderately loaded Exchange 2007 roles running inside virtual machines respond in benchmarks almost identically to a comparable physical server, and VMware technology is fully compatible with industry-standard 64-bit hardware and operating systems.
Ensure High Levels of Availability at a Lower Cost
Clustering servers for all of the Exchange roles can be expensive and complex, but you can reduce that cost and complexity by implementing VMware High Availability (HA) clusters. If hardware fails, VMware HA will automatically restart all virtual machines on another server in your high availability cluster. You can also utilize VMware HA to implement site-wide disaster recovery without the need for duplicate hardware.
Streamline Management and Accelerate Deployment
With VMware technology, you can save exact images of your Exchange Server configurations as virtual machine templates. New virtual machines deployed from templates are ready for production in minutes, and recovering a failed mailbox server can be as simple as deploying a new virtual machine from a template and attaching the database.
Rely on a Production-proven Platform
VMware offers a mature, customer-proven virtualization platform on which to base your Microsoft Exchange environment. More than 85% of VMware customers deploy VMware in production IT environments, and 54% of customers use VMware as their standard platform for delivering enterprise applications.
Read the Customer Results Survey
Customer Success Stories
Bowdoin College
Founded in 1794, Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college that uses VMware Infrastructure 3 to maintain a cost-effective enterprise-class disaster recovery solution for Exchange and several other critical applications.
Read the Bowdoin College Success Story
Genilogix
Genilogix helps Fortune 100 companies optimize quality, performance and availability from their business applications. The company uses VMware Infrastructure 3 to create entirely virtualized IT environments that eliminate server sprawl, provide optimum availability and deliver excellent disaster recovery for Microsoft Exchange and many other applications.
Read the Genilogix Success Story
Princeton Softech
Princeton Softech virtualized its test lab using VMware Infrastructure and VMware Lab Manager as a lab automation solution for creating, capturing, suspending, indexing, archiving and recreating testing environments for Exchange and numerous other enterprise applications.
Read the Princeton Softech Success Story
Additional Resources
High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Exchange Using VMware® Infrastructure 3
Traditional approaches to Exchange availability and disaster recovery are often inflexible, costly, and lack process automation and scalability. VMware® Infrastructure 3, the ideal platform for today’s dynamic messaging environments, adapts easily to changing workloads, scales as an organization grows, and protects against common outages that can impact e-mail servers and disrupt communications.
Learn more about deploying Exchange on a VMware platform
16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server
The VMware Performance team recently demonstrated the scalability of VMware ESX by running an unheard-of 16,000 Exchange mailboxes on a single physical server host. Read the VROOM blog from the VMware Performance team to find how they managed to achieve such a large capacity without sacrificing throughput or performance.
Read the VROOM Blog Article, “16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server”
Best Practices – Deploying Microsoft Exchange 2003 in VMware Infrastructure
The increased uptime, reduced maintenance costs, and enhanced flexibility that VI3 can provide to Exchange Server are documented in this case study of deploying Microsoft Exchange 2003 on VI3. Best practices are provided for storage, network, and virtual machine sizing to get the most out of virtual Exchange deployments.
Download the Best Practices Guide
ESG Lab Report: Exchange Server 2007 on VMware Infrastructure 3 and iSCSI Storage
This report provides an independent analysis from the Enterprise Strategy Group of VMware ESX’s enterprise-class storage system. This third-party evaluation considers storage options and shows how the storage management capabilities in VMware ESX provide the ability to scale under the most demanding of IO workloads.
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