I just discovered this Exchange-related forum and thought I'd also ask here. Recently I posted a question in the Hyper-V forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsserver2008r2virtualization/thread/24d88391-3621-43a2-abde-5c17e29c5950 My question was: Looking around, I haven't been able to find the Microsoft official/approved or best practice method for handling a Hyper-V VM running Exchange 2003 when the Hyper-V host is instructed to power down by the UPS software.e.g. the power goes out, the UPS tells an agent on the Hyper-V host to begin a graceful shutdown. Upon the shutdown of the Hyper-V service, the are several options for the "Automatic Stop Action" for a VM. I'm thinking that for many types of server workloads, a "Save the Virtual Machine State" is fine.However, I'm not sure about the validity of a saved state for an Exchange 2003 VM. For example, it may be in the middle of accepting a message with a large attachment, or perhaps sending one. Is a "Saved State" a valid state that can be maintained for a long period of time--for an Exchange server? What will happen when the Exchange VM is started again, possibly hours or even days later? I'm sure the underlying Windows Server 2003 host (in the VM) for Exchange will carry on as if nothing happened. But Exchange might have been downloading or sending email, passing a message to an Outlook client, etc. when the "Save State" happened. What would be the consequences of it "carrying on as if nothing happened" when such a large amount of time has elapsed?

Hi, I would like to explain that Exchange 2003 isn't officially supported on Hyper-V. Please refer to the following thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/exchangesvrdeploy/thread/7058fbca-07c4-4380-a828-56ba3dee0b88 Regarding the scenario you provided, I think you can build a lab and have a test... Thanks, Elvis

My general feeling is it should be fine but I'm not sure I'd want to go down that path. The gains are pretty minimal IMO.Active Directory, 4th Edition - www.briandesmond.com/ad4/