Trying to figure out best Exchange performance ESX on SAN

[ewitte]

Lots of new stuff going on for me so trying to get my head around it.

VMWare ESX doing High Availability with the data on a DS3200 SAN (SAS). Servers are also IBM Dual 6-core processors with 66GB ram and no local drives (running ESX off of internal flash chip).

The performance drive array is 600GB 15K SAS * 8 in RAID 10
There is also a SATA 2TB * 4 RAID 5 array for mostly backups

Trying to figure out optimal setup for the VM running Exchange. Was thinking of doing a separate LUN for the drive running transaction logs and pass through in VMWARE. There will be at most 3-4 more VMs running off the SAN but not heavy hitters (Terminal server for 5-10 users, blackberry server, etc).

The drive configuration can change but it needs strong fault tolerance and 2TB minimum. Doesn't need to be 100% overboard because its 100-200 users and maybe 200-300 worth of database.

[vertices]

It really depends on your environment but for setups of this size I normally try to maximize performance by creating a single RAID10 array like you already have planned. Try not to have LUNs more than 512GB in size and also don't let them get more than 90% full.

I would def carve out some LUNs for various servers. The TS needs it's own LUN. Exchange might perform better with multiple LUNs but I haven't tried it. For 100-200 users I would probably just give Exchange 1 LUN and then divide that into separate volumes to have the database and logs and such on their own volumes. You could use multiple LUNs here instead but I don't think it will make much of a difference performance wise.

You could then just use 1 more LUN for all the remaining servers such as BES.

[ewitte]

Thanks. Its in production now. After running some tests I'm no longer worrying Its a good 3-4 times faster than even our fastest physical server out there. Tried running a defrag on the old exchange DB after moving all the mailboxes off so it would transfer the VM faster (still need it to route to 2003 servers) and it was going to take hours. Ran it after moving it to ESX and it completed in 5 Also load simulator handled 1000+ users just fine.