I often hear questions or concerns about virtualizing Exchange. E-Oasis found a new VMware white paper and provides a nice lead in explaining how VMware corporate took their physical servers and migrated to virtual, reducing aggregrate hardware usage.
One might ask why VMware’s Exchange servers were not virtualized before this, particularly when VMware was a smaller company with less mailboxes? Perhaps they decided earlier versions of Exchange were not virtualization candidates? Maybe limitations in earlier version of ESX made it less than attractive? I don’t know why but it would have been cooler to see VMware put their money where their mouth is earlier on. Perhaps someone from VMware can chime in on a comment here.
At any rate, it’s an absolutely beautiful white paper and I’m actually surprised at the level of detail some of the diagrams get into providing network host names and IP addresses for the infrastructure. I suppose they could be ficticious, but the names look rather authentic and not made up to me. Kudos.
Take a look at VMware’s whitepaper here.
