Exchange Server Pro » VMWare

Exchange Server 2010 DAGs and VMware High Availability

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:00:13 +0000

If you are planning to deploy Exchange Server 2010 Database Availability Groups, and you virtualize your Exchange environment, then it is important to understand the supported scenarios.

Microsoft makes it very clear in their system requirements for Exchange Server 2010:

Microsoft doesn’t support combining Exchange high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers. DAGs are supported in hardware virtualization environments provided that the virtualization environment doesn’t employ clustered root servers, or the clustered root servers have been configured to never failover or automatically move mailbox servers that are members of a DAG to another root server.

In short, DAG members should have any virtualization high availability options disabled.

This is in slight contrast to the advice from VMware themselves:

While the use of database availability groups on top of hypervisor based clustering is not a formerly (sic) supported configuration, internal VMware tests have shown that the two technologies can co-exist and can be a viable solution to ensure maximum recoverability in the case of a host failure.

To paraphrase, it isn’t supported but we think you’ll be fine.

You might get some push back from customers or managers who have been sold on the idea of VMware HA for everything, or who take the line from VMware as implied support for the configuration. But in the real world I prefer to go with what is supported over what is possible.

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Installing VMWare Tools on Windows Server 2008 Core

Paul Cunningham — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:24:56 +0000

When installing the VMWare tools on a core install of Windows Server 2008 some people are confused to find that nothing happens after selecting “Install/Upgrade VMWare Tools” from the client window.

Even though the VMWare Tools image mounts to the virtual CD-ROM drive it does not autorun as you would expect in a normal install of Windows Server 2008. However you can still change directory to the virtual CD-ROM and see the VMWare Tools installation files are available.

To install the VMWare Tools you can simply launch setup.exe from the command line.

Follow the installation wizard accepting the default settings. You can also ignore the warnings about the Microsoft Help HTML engine and the version of Internet Explorer.

When the installer has finished you can reboot as normal and the VMWare Tools will now be installed.

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Exchange Server 2007 is now supported for hardware virtualisation

Paul Cunningham — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:00:19 +0000

We’ve been virtualising Exchange Server 2007 since it was first released but this week Microsoft has announced their official support policies for virtualised Exchange environments. It is a bit heavy on the Hyper-V but also references the list of support partners for non-Microsoft hardware virtualisation. When I checked this earlier in the week VMWare was a notable absence but today Dugie confirmed for me that they’ve been added to the list, which now stands as follows:

Cisco Systems, Inc.
Citrix Systems, Inc.
Novell, Inc.
Sun Microsystems
Unisys Corp.
Virtual Iron Software
VMware, Inc.

If you’re planning an Exchange Server 2007 deployment using a virtualisation platform be sure to read Microsoft’s recommendations for sizing virtual machines.

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VMWare to release VMWare ESXi for free

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:08:45 +0000

I saw Dan’s post on this subject and did a little Googling and lo and behold, VMWare have announced that their ESXi product will be released for free.

I’m no VMWare guy like these guys , but as I understand it ESXi is the skinny little hypervisor (clocking in at 32mb) that lets you run virtual guest operating systems. So you could buy yourself a server with a few cores, lots of RAM, some disk (hey maybe even use iSCSI for storage ) and run lots of virtual servers within that environment.

How can they be releasing something so good for free? Well they’ve done it before, releasing the successor to VMWare GSX Server called VMWare Server for free a few years ago. This was awesome for IT pros who rely on virtualisation to run labs when they are doing training. And now with ESXi we’ll be able to do it even easier (VMWare Server still requires you to install an OS like Windows first, whereas ESXi is the OS – so to speak).

Aside from having done this before, VMWare says the bulk of their revenues come from sales of their Virtual Infrastructure suite (the bits that let you run clusters of ESX servers, do failover of guests between hosts, resource management etc). So basically they can afford to give away the basic bits (run virtual guests on a single host) for free.

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