Network World Article: Exchange 2007 facing integration issues with other Microsoft software - January 11, 2007

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As Microsoft updates the individual key components of its enterprise software, integrating those pieces is proving challenging.

The issues center on Exchange 2007 and its relationship to Vista, released late last year along with Exchange to corporate users, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and the forthcoming Longhorn Server, slated to ship by the end of the year. In a nutshell, Exchange 2007 can't run on Microsoft's most current virtualization software, Exchange's management tools won't run on the just released Vista desktop operating system and the 64-bit messaging server is not compatible with Microsoft's forthcoming 64-bit server operating system called Longhorn...

Commentary...

Often I get asked about various issues in the Exchange world by journalists such as John Fontana. We use our experiences with Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 to answer the press as openly as we can without violating any NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) we might have with Microsoft or other companies.

During development of our Exchange 2007 solution, our engineering team evaluated virtualizing Exchange roles as we thought it was a great way to try to reduce some of the cost and complexity of the multiple different ways to deploy roles with Exchange 2007.

Here's what they found, and what led to our scrapping plans to deliver an appliance via this approach. We will re-evaluate this decision with Exchange 2007 SP1 and when and if Virtual Server 2008 (?) and support for 64-bit guest systems by Microsoft is released.

Exchange Roles in a Virtual Environment

In this configuration, the Mailbox, CAS and HT roles are installed in a virtual machine, hosted by VMWare Server. Each virtual instance is serviced and managed just like a standalone machine. There are a few advantages and disadvantages with going this route.

Advantages

1. Standardized Images: Virtual Machine (VM) method will enable us to standardize on one image and deploy it everywhere. It helps in cutting down the number of platforms we need to test, validate, maintain and update.
2. Upgrade Path: VM method will help in providing a smooth upgrade path for customers. If the customers need more horse power in CAS/HT or MB roles, one more VM instance can be added to the existing hardware.
3. Dynamic Load Balancing and VM Migration: By using VMWare ESX server, dynamic load balancing of VM load between several physical hosts. This allows better hardware utilization.
4. Large Organizations are already invested in to virtualization and understand the pros and cons of this technology. So selling virtualized messaging solution would be fairly easy as they could use their existing tools to monitor them if needed.

Disadvantages

1. Lower performance if the server hosts more virtual instances. This method is useful only if there are many instances of nodes to manage.
2. More server instances (roles) need to be managed.
3. Requires a lot more RAM than is necessary. This is due to VMWare server overhead.
4. Dynamic Migration and Load Balancing would require VMWare ESX server. ESX Server is expensive and adds cost and maintenance to the solution.
5. VMWare server itself would need monitoring by Azaleos software.
6. Exchange 2007 not supported in production environments on VMWare by Microsoft

Keith McCall
CTO, Azaleos Corporation
[email protected]