Storage Validation in A Virtual World
Deploying Exchange can be a challenge. Particularly when you are all ready to validate your servers & storage with Jetstress and you realize that even though we suggest that you should always run Jetstress prior to going into production, you discover that we don’t support running Jetstress in a virtual machine on that fancy new virtual platform you just deployed. Ouch. Now what?
First, some background. You might be wondering why we don’t support running Jetstress in a virtual machine. The reason is actually quite straightforward. Over the years as we have worked with customers and partners who were either deploying new hardware for Exchange or validating Exchange storage solutions in the Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP), we saw a number of examples of Jetstress test results where the reported IO latency numbers were wildly inaccurate. Given the lack of trust in the reported performance metrics, we had to ensure that Jetstress was not run in this configuration. This resulted in the guidance that customers deploying on virtual infrastructure should validate storage performance by running Jetstress in the root rather than in a guest virtual machine. While this was a feasible workaround with Hyper-V, it’s not a realistic solution for other hypervisors.
Just as the Exchange product has matured, the hypervisor products that some of our customers use to manage their Exchange infrastructure have matured as well, and we decided that the time had come to do some new testing and see if those strange performance results of the past would come to haunt us again. After weeks of automated testing with multiple hypervisors and well over 100 individual Jetstress tests completed in various configurations, we’ve reached a conclusion…
Effective immediately, we support running the Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress 2010 tool in virtual guest instances which are deployed on one of the following hypervisors:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (or newer)
- Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (or newer)
- VMware ESX 4.1 (or newer)
Read the complete article at https://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/04/02/storage-validation-in-a-virtual-world.aspx
Read my favorites blogs:
Designing a backup less Exchange 2010 Architecture
Microsoft Exchange 2010 CAS Array – Steps and Recommendations
Appear Offline in Microsoft Office Communicator Server 2007