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Exchange Server 2003 on VMware ESX 3
The whitepaper, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Performance on VMware® ESX Server 3, discusses the performance and scalability of Exchange Server 2003 when it is deployed within virtual machines hosted by VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 on a Dell® PowerEdge® 6850 server with a Dell-EMC CX500 FC SAN. The Heavy user profile from Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2003 Load Simulator benchmarking tool was used to simulate the Exchange workload. Results indicated that a uniprocessor virtual machine can support up to 1,300 Heavy users. Our experiments also show that consolidating multiple instances of these uniprocessor Exchange virtual machines on a PowerEdge 6850 can cumulatively support up to 4,000 Heavy users while still providing acceptable performance and scaling. The complete paper is available in PDF format. This wiki page provides the highlights and a place to discuss and ask questions about the paper via the comments section at the bottom of the page.
The performance and sizing studies were done at the Dell Enterprise Solutions Engineering Labs in collaboration with VMware engineers. The purpose of the tests was to measure, analyze, and understand the performance of Exchange in both the physical and virtual environments. In our test configuration the system under test (SUT) was a Dell PowerEdge 6850 server. The PowerEdge 6850 was configured with four 2.66 GHz dual-core Intel Xeon 7020 processors and 16GB of RAM. In the physical environment, the system was running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (32-bit) and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 (SP2). In the virtualized environment, the system was running VMware ESX Server 3.0.1, and the virtual machines were configured with the same operating system and application as in the physical system.
Table 1. System Under Test (SUT) Configuration
Table 2. Storage
Figure 2. UP and SMP Physical and Virtual Throughput Comparisons
Additional details, including system component level testing of processors, memory, and NIC performace, are included in the full whitepaper - Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Performance on VMware® ESX Server 3.
Please use the comments area below for discussion and questions about this whitepaper.
Test System Configuration
The performance and sizing studies were done at the Dell Enterprise Solutions Engineering Labs in collaboration with VMware engineers. The purpose of the tests was to measure, analyze, and understand the performance of Exchange in both the physical and virtual environments. In our test configuration the system under test (SUT) was a Dell PowerEdge 6850 server. The PowerEdge 6850 was configured with four 2.66 GHz dual-core Intel Xeon 7020 processors and 16GB of RAM. In the physical environment, the system was running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (32-bit) and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 (SP2). In the virtualized environment, the system was running VMware ESX Server 3.0.1, and the virtual machines were configured with the same operating system and application as in the physical system.
Table 1. System Under Test (SUT) Configuration
| Server | Dell PowerEdge 6850 |
| Processors | Four 2.66 GHz dual-core Intel Xeon 7020 (eight total cores) |
| Memory | 16GB DDR-2 400 ECC SDRAM |
| Hard Drivers (for operating system only) | Two 146GB 10,000 RPM drives in a RAID 1 array |
| HBA | Two Emulex Fibre Channel HBAs |
| Virtualization Software | VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 |
| Operating System (Physical and Virtual) | Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (32-bit) |
| Application (Physical and Virtual) | Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 |
| Storage enclosure | Dell EMC CX500 with one disk processor enclosure (DPE) and three disk array enclosures (DAE) |
| Hard drives | Fifty-four 73GB 15,000 RPM Drives |
| RAID configuration | Eight 6-drive RAID 1+0 volumes for Microsoft Exchange Information Store (IS) One 6-drive RAID 1+0 volume partitioned into eight LUNs for the transaction log |
Physical vs Virtual Performance
In order to compare the performance of physical and virtual environments, we conducted UP and SMP LoadSim experiments, first on the physical system, then in the ESX Server 3.0.1 virtual environment. The software stacks, Windows Server 2003 running Exchange Server 2003, were configured identically on the physical and virtual systems. Doing so enabled an “apples to apples” comparison between the physical and virtual setups. The results of these experiments are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. UP and SMP Physical and Virtual Throughput Comparisons
Scale Up and Scale Out Performance
In addition to comparing the virtual to physical performance, we also wanted to study the scale out performance (by increasing the number of VMs) and the scale up performance (by increasing the number of virtual CPUs configured for each VM). We conducted experiments using the following configurations:
Scale out (increasing the number of VMs):
- One, two, and four uniprocessor virtual machines.
- One and two dual-processor virtual machines.
Scale up (increasing the number of processors per VM):
The results of these scale up and scale out experiments are shown in Figure 3.
Additional details, including system component level testing of processors, memory, and NIC performace, are included in the full whitepaper - Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Performance on VMware® ESX Server 3.
Please use the comments area below for discussion and questions about this whitepaper.
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