I hadn’t really read this one too much because I don’t deal with Exchange very often. But it came up on the Minasi Forum over the last few days and Jetze Mellema (Exchange MVP) posted a link to the official support article.
Does Exchange 2010 support virtualisation? Yes … barely. There’s so many notes associated with the support statement from the Exchange teams that you really want to sit back and go Hmmm!
Obviously it supports Hyper-V and other hardware virtualisation solutions in the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program.
Microsoft goes on to say:
- The Unified Messaging server role is not supported in VM’s.
- Virtual disks that dynamically expand aren’t supported by Exchange.
- Virtual disks that use differencing or delta mechanisms (such as Hyper-V’s differencing VHDs or snapshots) aren’t supported.
Other notes from this site are:
- You cannot run a DAG on a clustered host, e,g. a VMware cluster with VMotion or a Hyper-V cluster with Live/Quick Migration.
- Snapshots of the VM are not supported.
- The Exchange team supports no more than 2 virtual processors per logical processor on the host. For example, you cannot have more than 16 virtual processors on a dual, quad core host (8 logical processors). Normally, Hyper-V has a max of 8:1 ratio.
- Like with SQL, snapshots are not supported.
Not that these restrictions don’t just apply to Hyper-V. They apply to all virtualisation solutions.