My results are similar to Aric's. I have an entire virtual forest (2 DC's, 2 Exchange Servers) I set up to work with for one of Robbie's books on a single PC and as Aric mentioned, worked fine except for perf. I will admit that it wasn't super heavily used, but it did work.
As for why isn't Exchange supported on it. I think it is due to the idea that Exchange bottlenecks generally at IO's. Going virtual won't help that so the Exchange team probably figured it wasn't worth the effort to test and support it. I can visualize scenarios where it would be possible someone would want to do it, say some kind of host company hosting email for multiple companies letting someone else run their email systems and don't want to put people from the various companies all on one Exchange server (maybe even a contractual obligation) get want to reduce the number of physical servers overall. For instance, say you have 10 companies with 50 people each... Who wants 10 different physical servers for that. Overall the Exchange folks at MS want to keep the scope of support for Exchange as narrow as possible from what I have seen. It is a great big complicated product that most of them don't really understand how it works and there aren't enough folks knowledgable in the details to troubleshoot all of the possible ways it could be set up and run. I have submitted something like 6-7 bugs in the last couple of weeks for Exchange when doing things supposedly supported but just a little bit outside what the Exchange team probably expected. joe -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bernard, Aric Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 12:15 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Exchange in VM (was RE: [ActiveDir] Running DCs in Virtual Se rver 2005 - whitepaper) Noah, Just as a point of comparison, I have two Exchange 2003 Servers running in VMs as well as some domain controllers. Originally they ran under VMWare GSX for about 9 months and now under VS2005 for about 6 months. The only problems I have ever had (aside from performance) occurred during the move from GSX to VS2005. Originally I had set up the VS2005 systems with Virtual SCSI disks, per the white paper. Unfortunately I experienced VM lockups a dozen times during the first week. In the troubleshooting effort I switched to Virtual IDE disks and have not had a problem since. Regards, Aric -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Noah Eiger Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 8:20 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Exchange in VM (was RE: [ActiveDir] Running DCs in Virtual Se rver 2005 - whitepaper) I believe the disks are fixed size. (I will check when I get to the office) I will also look a the logs to see the specific errors. Brett, does that mean that defragging the underlying OS will have little impact on the virtual environment? Should I defrag the virtual disks from within the virtual machine? And, does anyone know if the 3rd part tools are supported in the virtual environment? -- nme -----Original Message----- From: Myrick, Todd (NIH/CIT) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 3:34 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Exchange in VM (was RE: [ActiveDir] Running DCs in Virtual Se rver 2005 - whitepaper) Man this sucks, I didn't know this White Paper existed. I have been working on documenting AD on VM's for both VS2005 and VMware ESX. You might be experiencing the fragmentation due to using the feature that dynamically expands the volume as it uses disk space. You might try just mapping raw disk space. Todd -----Original Message----- From: Brett Shirley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2004 9:38 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Exchange in VM (was RE: [ActiveDir] Running DCs in Virtual Server 2005 - whitepaper) Noah, You've piqued my curiousity ... What VM software were you using? Did you "hard" reboot the VMs? You were experiencing actual corruption issues? I guess I'm a little skeptical. Do you remember the nature of the corruptions? Were there AD JET level recovery issues? If you still have any of the event logs, I'd be curious to know what JET and AD events you felt indicated corruption, and the cause of the non-booting DC, get this via event log in DSRM (DS Restore Mode). I ask, because correctness (i.e. no corruption) should not be sacraficed b/c the underlying host has a fragmented FS. It should just be slow ... Cheers, Brett Shirley Dev Wooo hoo, I happened upon the actual thingy I'm supposed to put at the bottom of my mail! Here: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. On Sat, 18 Dec 2004, Noah Eiger wrote: > A little bit of a tangent: I had built an entire virtual network with DCs > and an Exchange server. I started getting tons of serious corruption errors > in the logs and soon DC2 would just not boot. It turns out that the host > machine was horribly fragmented. > > Is the presence of Exchange a likely culprit? If so, is the solution to run > Exchange on a physical box patched in via a physical extension of that > virtual network? > > -- nme > > -----Original Message----- > From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2004 1:44 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: Exchange in VM (was RE: [ActiveDir] Running DCs in Virtual > Server 2005 - whitepaper) > > It's not support in any emulated environment. > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Chris Lynch > Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2004 3:14 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: Exchange in VM (was RE: [ActiveDir] Running DCs in Virtual > Server 2005 - whitepaper) > > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Because VS2005 wasn't designed for intensive I/O, CPU or RAM systems. > VS2005 has on average a 35-45% overhead on the host machine, because of > the Host OS. Also, all VM's are running in Emulated Mode on the CPU. > VMware would be better suited for your need of Exchange running within a > VM. > > VS2005 doesn't offer the same performance enhancements VMware ESX server > can, and GSX server for that matter. Ok, GSX doesn't offer CPU resource > throttling, like VS2005. But, I would rather spend the extra money for > GSX, and have a more stable virtualization platform than VS/VPC 2005. > > Chris > > > > > > List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm > List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ > List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
