Exchange 2007 on VMWare

I recently had the nice job of installing Exchange 2007 onto a VMWare esxi server As much as I like Exchange I am not a very big fan of the over complexness of Exchange 2007 so I knew I would be in for a nice treat doing this.

This was quite a unique install for me as the whole Exchange 2007 was going to be on one virtual machine using just the local disks in the esxi server.

I had read reports that the ideal way to do this is to install the OS onto the virtual machine and then put the exchange datastore onto external storgage using iScsi or an FC San.

Well with a little help from research I had done the install went very well. The server was a rackmount Dell PowerEdge 2950 with 16Gb Ram, lots of 15k SAS drives, several network cards and a dual Quad core Xeon CPU giving 8 cores to play with.

The OS was Windows Server 2008 64-bit Enterprise edition The install was done via an ISO image copied to the esxi datastore. Windows Server 2008 can now be installed in about 10 minutes. The speed of this server is very impressive and even with five seperate virtual machines running this seems to be no slouch.

The migration from Exchange 2003 was pretty straight forward and in general one of the nicest migrations I have done. Time will tell if local storage is the right setup here. With only 30 users it should be sufficient although I can see in the future an external disk array being used to house the datastore.