A few weeks ago I got an assignment to review a colleague’s infrastructure design based on VMware.
The design was fine (because they used my design document as template ) but one thing triggered me.

There was a special port group on one of the virtual switches names ‘MSCLUSTER’. No problem so far but I heard the client recently migrated to iSCSI storage.

The combination Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) combined with iSCSI triggered  my alarm bells. As I recalled Microsoft Clustering on iSCSI is not a problem but Microsoft Clustering on VMware with iSCSI is not supported (by VMware).

So, I rejected the design based on this support issue.

This message was not well received, as it turned out they had just migrated their clustered Exchange servers and had been running this way for a while now. Proposing to the client to migrate again was no option. So they tried to  question my findings. They had been running this setup without any problems and Exchange CCR clustering wasn’t real Microsoft Clustering because no disks were clustered, only the Exchange services.

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As Microsoft Exchange server is one of my area’s of expertise (or so they keep telling me )  I have had numerous discussions in the past whether you should virtualize Exchange or not. For ages Microsoft has claimed it cannot be done, performance would suffer severely, you would not receive support in a virtual environment etcetera.

To be honest, I didn’t really care about it. We’ve designed perfectly working Exchange organizations on VMware when MS was still refusing support. There are some rules you need to respect when you design your messaging environment, but generally it is no problem if you have the required resources available!

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A lot of companies still have some doubts or fears for virtualizing Exchange, so I compiled some information on virtualization Exchange on VMware ESX.

There are already a lot of articles and posts on this subject.  Below you find a couple of links to these articles and posts:

• Deploying Microsoft Exchange in VMware Infrastructure
  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/701
  

• High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Exchange using VMware Infrastructure 3
  http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/exchange_solution.html

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