VMware & Exchange 2013

[7DEMONSRISING]

With the release of v 7.0 snap manager, I was wondering if someone could give me a dummies guide to best practices with regards to protecting Exchange 2013?

We are looking to deploy only virtual Exchange servers for the time being and all at a single datacenter. Just looking at some high level advide for starters i.e the recomended storage presentation through to the virtual exchange servers (VMDKs or iSCSI direct to guest OS via the iSCSI initiator etc)

Thanks in advance

[nigelg1965]

Hi

Can't speak for v7 and  Exchange 2013, but I can relay some of our experiences with 6.x and Exchange 2010. Apologies. if I teaching my granny to suck eggs here.

With regard to storage presentation; if you want to use snapmanager for Exchange you'll need to use Snapdrive. The choice is then to how to connect from the VM to the storage, the simplest way is running the MS ISCSI software initiator within the VM but this does have a performance hit, as with any other server application it's going to be dependent on what splice of the CPU it can get. If you present the storage to VMWare via ISCSI instead the connection is running at hypervisor level, much like it would with a fibre channel connection, this configuration works and is supported with the snap products.

[7DEMONSRISING]

Thanks for the reply, much apriciated. So if the storage is presented to VMware via iSCSI and a iSCSI datastore is created, is it supported to have to databases volume on a VMDK for Exchange?

[nigelg1965]

My understanding is that it is presented to VMWare like an RDM not as a VMDK, If you don't need to use snapmanager for exchange then you could use VMDK's.

This posting seems to confirm that  https://communities.netapp.com/thread/13932