Widen your vision: Experience Exchange 2010 on a virtualized platform

Running Windows exchange 2010 on a virtualized platform (with Hyper-V or VMware ESX) gives you a plethora of availability and recovery options, each providing varying levels of protection and cost.

Zero time invested in upgrade or system downtime:
A good deal of time, energy, and capital is involved in traditional physical environmental upgrades. It also means risk of data loss and extra time required for the recovery process. Virtualizing exchange server helps save substantial amount of time and money in the following ways—
• Planning and implementation time
• Sizing and acquisition of new hardware
• Downtime for system upgrade, which incurs higher costs and risks of data loss

Faster data recovery minus time and data loss:
Data recovery and systematic storage are the two main concerns for IT professionals. Virtualized Exchange environments can help you recover from-
• Planned or unplanned hardware outages
• Hardware degradation
• Application failure or Failover Clusters
Virtualized capability automatically balances workloads and shared storage on a virtual platform helps in keeping incidents of application failures at bay.

High performance mailbox servers:
Running your exchange server 2010 on a virtualized platform gives you the advantage of enormous largest mailbox server which that exceeds physical performance. In addition, you get the following—

• Virtual Machine scalability up by 8 vCPU and 256 GB of memory
• Disk IO scalability increased to more than 350,000 IOPS, enabling VMware ESX to support IO-intensive applications such as Exchange and large Databases
• Network IO increased to 40 Gbps

This also means enhanced architecture and improved features of Microsoft Exchange 2010 and 2007 that significantly reduce the IO requirements as compared to Exchange 2003.

Do more with enhanced exchange infrastructure:
A virtualized platform for windows exchange server 2010 allows you to scale exchange mailboxes on multiple smaller virtual machines to maximize the throughput of the physical server. Windows Exchange server can be scaled out on 8 Virtual Machines, each supporting 2,000 very heavy mailbox users, to support 16,000 users on one 16-core server.

GSS Infotech, which has VMWare as one of its strategic alliances helps you leverage the inherent benefits of a Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 deployment on VMware vSphere.

For more information on this, log on to www.gssinfotech.com

Ready for Windows Exchange Server 2010

Windows exchange server 2010 with its wide array of new and advanced features, is worth a try. But if you are all set for an official roll-out, you need to consider a few pre-requisites, before you switch to Windows Exchange Server 2010.

Hardware requirements for Exchange Server 2010:
• System requirements: Exchange server 2010 is compatible with x64 architecture-based computer with Intel processor that supports Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T). It also runs fine on any AMD processor that supports the AMD64 platform. However, Intel Itanium family IA64 processors are not supported by Exchange Server 2010.
• Operating system requirements: Exchange server 2010 supports Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard and Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise Edition.

Software requirements for Exchange Server 2010:
ServerManagerCmd commands and the PowerShell commands are two of the most essential requirements for installing Windows Exchange Server 2010. The related download files contain necessary commands for installing Windows (2008 SP2 or 2008 R2) and for each Exchange role.

You must also keep in mind that if ServerManagerCmd command may use different XML files if you are installing windows server 2008 or other servers. It is also necessary to have Exchange media ready when you are installing a role.

If you need to run Exchange 2010 on a virtualization platform, you need to remember that not all roles are supported. The Unified Messaging Server role, for instance is not supported in a virtual environment because of its reliance on time-sensitive, real-time communications. However, Microsoft exchange server 2010 supports some common virtualization platforms like Microsoft Hyper-V R2, VMware’s ESX/vSphere, and Citrix’s XenServer.

Additional requirements for Exchange Server 2010
There are a couple of other requirements that one needs to consider for adopting Windows Exchange Server 2010, such as —
• Memory ― A minimum of 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM per server with 5 megabytes (MB) of RAM are required for each mailbox.
• Disk space —At least 1.2 GB space on the drive is used for installation. An additional 500 MB of available disk space is recommended if you have plans for installing for Unified Messaging (UM) language pack.
• Available disk space: At least 200 MB of available disk space is required on the system drive.
• File format―Disk partitions need to be formatted as NTFS file systems.
• Monitor―your screen resolution needs to be 800x600 pixels or higher

Once you have ensured that you have met all of the aforementioned requirements, your adoption of windows exchange server 2010 will be smooth and safe.

For more information on this, log on to www.gssinfotech.com