As users begin to increasingly adopt VMware® virtualization products to support production applications, some are looking to move even performance-intensive applications, like Microsoft® Exchange Server, to VMs. Dell engineers have spent time characterizing and testing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2007 on VMware.

Exchange Server on VMware Infrastructure

Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with VMware ESX Server 3	Virtualizing Exchange 2007: The Final Frontier?
Using VMware High Availability and VMotion with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Virtual Machines on Dell PowerEdge Servers	Exchange Server 2003 Performance on ESX 3
Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments	Deploying Exchange Server 2007 on VMware Infrastructure: A VMware Internal Case Study

• Microsoft Recommendations for Exchange in VMs – Microsoft's Exchange team has put out guidelines for how to run Exchange in a virtualized environment.
• Virtualizing Exchange Server 2007 on ESX 3 – White paper examining performance of Exchange Server 2007 on VMware ESX 3 with 500-, 1000-, and 2000-user workloads.
• VMotion and HA with Exchange 2007 on ESX 3 – White paper providing a detailed look at performance of Exchange Server 2007 VMs while using VMware vMotion™ and VMware High Availability (VMware HA) with 500-, 1000-, and 2000-user workloads.
• Virtualizing Exchange 2007: The Final Frontier – Presentation examining advantages and disadvantages of virtualizing Exchange 2007 as well as performance characterization of VM performance, vMotion, VMware HA, and Exchange VMs running with and other types of VMs at the same time. Presented at VMworld 2007.
• Exchange Server 2003 Performance on ESX 3 – White paper providing a detailed examination of performance of Exchange Server 2003 VM running on Dell™ PowerEdge™ 6850 and VMware ESX Server 3.0.1, including virtual versus physical comparisons.
• VMware Internal Case Study: Deployment of Exchange 2007 on VI3 – White paper providing a detailed case study of the actual deployment of a fully virtualized Exchange Server 2007 environment at VMware. Includes detailed topology diagrams and configuration information.