Tag: Exchange 2010
PVSCSI Bug Causing Exchange 2010 Jetstress to Crash
A few weeks back I was called in to help a customer who was experiencing problems completing Jetstress testing for an Exchange 2010 deployment. It wasn’t an issue of Jetstress reporting failed tests. Rather, they were unable to get through most of their tests without the Jetstress application actually crashing (JetstressWin.exe has stopped working). They would see the following after…
2012 – The Year of SQL Virtualization
Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably seen me say this a few times – 2012 will be the year of SQL virtualization, specifically SQL on vSphere. I figured it was about time to back that up with some facts and some opinions on just why I am so adamant about that statement. I spend a lot…
Microsoft Jetstress 2010 now supported in virtual machines
Microsoft announced on the Exchange Team blog today that they now support running Jetstress 2010 inside a virtual machine. You can read more about it and a little bit of the background on this one at the Exchange Team blog post here. If you aren’t familiar with Jetstress, here’s a two second version: Jetstress is a tool from Microsoft that…
Virtual machine snapshots and tier-1 apps: Not always supported
After seeing a discussion in the vExpert forums and in my own experience in talking to customers, I came to the conclusion that many people aren’t aware of some of the support restrictions around virtualizing tier-1 Microsoft applications. The one support requirement that many folks aren’t aware of is the use of virtual machine snapshots on Microsoft applications, particularly Exchange…
Guest clustering on vSphere: A familiar topic revisited
Yes, it’s 2012 and we’re still talking about whether or not organizations should consider running a Microsoft Windows Failover Cluster (sometimes referred to as MSCS clustering) in a vSphere environment. I know this topic has been written about before by others but I wanted to share some of my own thoughts and experiences around this topic. My focus these days…
Storage DRS of Exchange 2010 Workloads
On September 15th, VMware released a new whitepaper entitled “Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Performance on vSphere 5.” If you are interested in virtualizing Exchange 2010 (or really any mission critical application) I’d recommend giving it a read. One of the interesting things they’ve done in this test aside from scale up/scale out testing is to formally test vMotion and Storage…
Clearing up confusion regarding HA/vMotion support for Exchange 2010
As I discussed last week, Microsoft has updated their guidance and support regarding hypervisor high availability and live migration technologies with Exchange 2010. This is welcome news for anyone looking to virtualize Exchange 2010 on vSphere, as it now allows you to take advantage of vMotion and HA on all Exchange servers, even those in a Database Availability Group (DAG).…
vSphere and Exchange admins can live in harmony – Microsoft finally supports HA and vMotion
This Saturday, Microsoft published a new white paper entitled “Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V” that provides a lot of great info that is applicable to VMware as well. One of the most important things in this entire document is a change in policy regarding supporting virtualized Exchange 2010 with Database Availability…