Introduction

"Who is virtualizing Exchange 2007, and how are they doing it?" is a very common question. One answer is "VMware" and their method is explained in a white paper on VMware.com

This VIOPS doc has been written to raise the profile of that white paper to make it easier to find, and answer their questions, and provide some more resources on the subject - value add!

Outline

• Executive Summary

• Exchange Server 2003: Legacy Environment and it's limitations

• Migration Drivers for Virtualized Exchange

• Planning and Requirements

• Design and Implementation

• Conclusions

VMware has successfully deployed a fully virtualized Exchange Server 2007 environment on VMware Infrastructure.

This deployment has met and exceeded the business and technical requirements that were defined and which have been outlined in this paper. The benefits of virtualization combined with the benefits of Exchange 2007 offer capabilities and cost savings that are not otherwise available.

By virtualizing its Exchange infrastructure, VMware has gained the ability to:

1. Easily scale up and continuing to grow the deployment as the company’s base of users grows.

2. Deal efficiently with discontinuous points of growth, such as acquisitions and rapid user group provisioning/data migrations.

3. Continually monitor and optimize the physical and virtual infrastructure to continue to drive down costs associated with space, power/cooling and enabling the transition to “green IT.”

4. Evaluate and leverage advancements in hardware technologies with minimal/zero disruption on the production Exchange environment.

This project has been a complete success, and reflects the consistently positive experience that VMware customers report after deploying Exchange 2007 on VMware Infrastructure.

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