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VMware Site Recovery Manager

Have a customer ~ 500 MS Exchange users, single server.

Will be upgrading to Exchange 2010, they are looking for fault tolerance / high availability. They already use VMware for Exchange 2003.

Looking to get feedback on VMware Site Recovery Manager with Exchange 2010 , or any version of Exchange I guess.

There are price differences between Windows 2008 R2 standard and enterprise ( required for DAG and passive copy ), so would
VMware Site Recovery Manager work well?

If you can please provide links.

Thanks,
Mark

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Paul Solovyovsky

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markpalinux

ASKER

Storage is
IBM ds4000 series FC connected.

Interesting , if Exchange 2010 does not have single instance storage - and 10 users get a 2 meg attachment....

would you assume that 1 sender message goes to the transaction logs for 2 megs there, then 20 megs gets written to the database , for a total amount of 22 megs written to the storage, and thus need to replicated to the array on the other side?

Paul Solovyovsky

If you think about it, whatever gets written to the LUN gets replicated. I am not sure with IBM but I know with the Netapps we do dedupplication and thin provisioning which keeps this to a minimum.

If you don't have dedupe on the LUN than I imagine you would be replicating a lot of data

From what I've read 2010 dumped SIS, which is why most of our larger customers use Symantec Enterprise Vault to keep the database to a minimum (not yet ready for EX2010 but should be out shortly)

Paul Solovyovsky

I did verify with a few people..Exchange 2010 does not do SIS but it does compress attachments. With our Netapp deployments we can still handle it because it will do the SIS but I can't say the same with the IBM SANs unless they offer dedupe or they're N series.

SRM will only do VM recovery but you can probably do without and just use DAG to replicate to the DR site.

Paul Solovyovsky

how are you making out?

markpalinux

ASKER

I was worried about support - seems like storage vendors work with vmware to have vmware storage adapter drivers.

"For customers who purchase VMware products with IBM hardware and an IGS support agreement, IBM provides end-to-end support including the VMware software and licensed Microsoft software run within virtual machines."
Source: http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/ms_support_statement.html

Pulsolov,

Thanks your answers helped a lot. I will not know for some time if the customer will use SRM for Exchange.

Mark

Paul Solovyovsky

Keep in mind IBM N series is Netapp so everything I said will apply. Lots of new tools with new vSphere ESX 4.1

markpalinux

ASKER

Sorry forgot to add , MS says you need two cas/hub servers for redundancy since DAG and cas/hub network load balancing cannot be on the same server, that puts you at 5 servers, two cas/hub, three mailbox. unless you go with a hardware load balancer, which ms would prefer you to use exchange servers.

so for 300 ~ 500 users and a site using vmware SRM for other apps seems like a good solution, as long as your have vendor end-to-end support.

Thanks,
Mark

Paul Solovyovsky

SRM is a good tool, I have installed it several location and will be doing Exchange 2010 in vSphere shortly. Microsoft now states that you can have Exchange on SATA drives due to DAG due to the loss of SIS I think they had to make that move.