SME Best Practice Exchange 2010

[berendschotanus]

I have a question about the use of SME for Exchange 2010 in a VMware environment.

What is the best solution to use:

1. iSCSI LUN's within the VM guest (created with SnapDrive)

2. RDM iSCSI LUN's, als created with SnapDrive

Is there a document, Best Practice, which tells me what is the best solution, in a performance perspective, to use.

All input is welcome.

Regards,

Berend Schotanus

[f_duranti]

Performance wise it mostly depends on your hardware configuration.

If you have iSCSI offload card I think you cannot use them inside the vm but should use them from ESXi hosts.

If you have iSCSI dedicated cards ESXi can multipath (I've not tried it) iSCSI connections and probably balance the traffic.

If you're using 10gb cards you can use vmxnet3 inside the VM and have the 10gb link inside the vm (so it should not be a problem).

The difference is mostly in configuration and DR scenario, this document is really good at understanding a good DR configuration using RDM/VMWare SRM/Snapmirrored volumes:

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3822.pdf