Installing Exchange Server 2010 in a VMware environment
Hi Everyone, I've spent a good part of my day running through forums related to my need and couldn't find what I'm looking for so I am posting here. I am looking to setup Exchange 2010 running on a 2008 R2 Standard OS in a VMware environment. I only have about 25 users and about 50 mailboxes. Anticipating our current growth, we wont get to 50-75 users for at least a few years so my guess is that I can run my Exchange server on one box with my domains controllers on two seperate. My SAN is about 12 TB so I could dedicate whatever is needed to storage for the Exchange server. I've looked over VMware's Exchange 2010 Best Practices Guide along with Microsoft's Guiding Templates, but can't seem to nail down the right configuration my Exchange server should be. Can someone point me to a good guide? Also, I'm open to any other "heads' up" anyone can offer. Thanks in advanced!
March 27th, 2012 6:49pm

My only other reccomendation over Sukh828's is, after having configured multiple Exchange 2010 in VMWare is, if you are using VMWare HA, I would use a RDM in VMWare to house your logs, databases, etc. Make sure this LUN or LUN(s) are available to all hosts in the VMWare cluster, and have a scheduled SAN snapshot setup for the database and logs (not VMWare snap).
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March 28th, 2012 11:07am

I am curious about your recommendation for the use of a RDM. What is your reasoning behind this? {Just curious}
March 28th, 2012 3:51pm

Hi If you want to calculate capacity of server, you can run exchange calculator. http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/11/09/exchange-2010-mailbox-server-role-requirements-calculator.aspx You can calculate capacity of vm server. But I dont know how to calculate capacity of SAN. VM 1GB doesnt equal to SAN 1GB. Terence Yu TechNet Community Support
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March 28th, 2012 9:17pm

Well stated. I can see your reasoning.
April 3rd, 2012 9:59am

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