Announcing Enhanced Hardware Virtualization Support for Exchange 2010

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The Microsoft Exchange team is enhancing positioning by including additional supported scenarios regarding Exchange Server 2010 running under hardware virtualization software. Now the following support scenarios are being updated, for Exchange 2010 SP1, and later:

  • · The Unified Messaging server role is supported in a virtualized environment.
  • · Combining Exchange 2010 high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers, is now supported.

Due to improvements Microsoft made in Exchange Server 2010 SP1, along with more comprehensive testing of Exchange 2010 in a virtualized environment, Microsoft provides additional deployment flexibility to customers. The updated support guidance applies to any hardware virtualization vendor participating in the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

In addition, Microsoft also released the Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V whitepaper. This whitepaper is designed to provide technical guidance on Exchange server roles, capacity planning, sizing and performance, as well as high availability best practices.

Complete system requirements for Exchange Server 2010 running under hardware virtualization software can be found in Exchange 2010 System Requirements.