We moved our Exchange 2003 to a Hyper-V VM, and the speed increased dramatically. Of course the old hardware was a Poweredge 2650 with a 5 disk RAID5 and the new server is a Poweredge 2950 with a six disk RAID5, so the speed increase is down to the far better disk subsystem on the new server. Nevertheless, it is a lot faster!
Our main reason for using a VM is that we mirror the VM files (using a shadow copy) every night so if we lost the server for any reason it would take five minutes to boot the mirrored copy.
Microsoft does not indicate that that "support" Exchange 2003 running on Hyper-V. (Indeed, they only "support" running Exchange 2003 under Virtual Server 2005 R2 or later.)
Given that Exchange 2003 is a major version behind the current release of Exchange (soon to be two versions behind when Exchange 2010 goes RTM), I think it's unlikely that a lot more will be done by Microsoft to extend "support" for Exchange 2003 into other virtualized environments. I can't speak for Microsoft, of course, but I think it's a fair guess.
I haven't tried to run it under Hyper-V, but I suspect it will run fine. You'll suffer loss of IO performance as any application would in a virtualized environment. With Exchange 2003, which is especially IO hungry (moreso than Exchange 2007), this is a distinct disadvantage over running it on the "bare metal", so you need a good reason to be running it in virtualized environment.
I've run Exchange 2007 in a Hyper-V guest ever since the release of Hyper-V - and have not run into a single problem with it. My server was fairly small though, so I didn't have to worry about the IO when I made the decision to virtualize it. If you're planning on running a bigger implementation, I'd make sure that you put some thought into how you are going to manage the disks for your VM - since that's where your biggest bottleneck will likely be.
Im just in the process of going from VS2005 to Hyper-V R2 tonight. So we'll see how it goes. In regards to taking a VSS copy of the server we are looking at using SCVMM R2 to do things like that. Would that be what your using John?
I echo Evan here. It can run in a virtualized environment just fine, but you have to want to do that for a reason. We have an entire Exchange 2007 environment running on a VMWare ESX cluster, and it works for us. But the cluster nodes also host a bunch of other services as well. It can be done.
John,
Can you tell us how your VSS backup for Exchange 2003 is setup? What backup process/program are you using?
I work for a non-profit and we're in the process of testing Exchange 2003 on Hyper-V R2 running on a Dell R610 connected to a Datacore SanMelody server (hardware is PowerEdge T710 running Windows 2008 x64).
thanks,
Carlton.
We moved our Exchange 2003 to a Hyper-V VM, and the speed increased dramatically. Of course the old hardware was a Poweredge 2650 with a 5 disk RAID5 and the new server is a Poweredge 2950 with a six disk RAID5, so the speed increase is down to the far better disk subsystem on the new server. Nevertheless, it is a lot faster!
Our main reason for using a VM is that we mirror the VM files (using a shadow copy) every night so if we lost the server for any reason it would take five minutes to boot the mirrored copy.
JR
Microsoft's recommendations re: running Exchange 2003 in a virtualized environment are here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794548.aspx
Microsoft does not indicate that that "support" Exchange 2003 running on Hyper-V. (Indeed, they only "support" running Exchange 2003 under Virtual Server 2005 R2 or later.)
Given that Exchange 2003 is a major version behind the current release of Exchange (soon to be two versions behind when Exchange 2010 goes RTM), I think it's unlikely that a lot more will be done by Microsoft to extend "support" for Exchange 2003 into other virtualized environments. I can't speak for Microsoft, of course, but I think it's a fair guess.
I haven't tried to run it under Hyper-V, but I suspect it will run fine. You'll suffer loss of IO performance as any application would in a virtualized environment. With Exchange 2003, which is especially IO hungry (moreso than Exchange 2007), this is a distinct disadvantage over running it on the "bare metal", so you need a good reason to be running it in virtualized environment.
I've run Exchange 2007 in a Hyper-V guest ever since the release of Hyper-V - and have not run into a single problem with it. My server was fairly small though, so I didn't have to worry about the IO when I made the decision to virtualize it. If you're planning on running a bigger implementation, I'd make sure that you put some thought into how you are going to manage the disks for your VM - since that's where your biggest bottleneck will likely be.
Im just in the process of going from VS2005 to Hyper-V R2 tonight. So we'll see how it goes. In regards to taking a VSS copy of the server we are looking at using SCVMM R2 to do things like that. Would that be what your using John?
I echo Evan here. It can run in a virtualized environment just fine, but you have to want to do that for a reason. We have an entire Exchange 2007 environment running on a VMWare ESX cluster, and it works for us. But the cluster nodes also host a bunch of other services as well. It can be done.
John, Can you tell us how your VSS backup for Exchange 2003 is setup? What backup process/program are you using? I work for a non-profit and we're in the process of testing Exchange 2003 on Hyper-V R2 running on a Dell R610 connected to a Datacore SanMelody server (hardware is PowerEdge T710 running Windows 2008 x64). thanks, Carlton.