Microsoft Exchange Virtualized. See performaces with FC, iSCSI and NFS

There has been a PDF whitepaper published on the VROOM performance blog recently. I’m actually just testing Exchange in a virtual environment and the topic is quite interesting since I have several of my clients which are thinking of installing Microsoft Exchange 2007 but they’re not so sure about the performances they can expect in a virtual environment and with shared storage.

Sure think that I’m not gonna implement 16000 mailboxes, that’s for sure…. with eight Exchange 2007 VMs !!! But what is interesting is the fact that the performance difference between Fiber Chanel and iSCSI is not so big as I thought.

You know that I’m a big fan of iSCSI since you can play with iSCSI NAS Openfiler at home. You can configure iSCSI Openfiler NAS storage even inside of VMware Workstation. Together with one “virtual” ESX too.

Conclusions:

All three protocols tested have shown to be able to support 16,000 Exchange users in both the Heavy and Double Heavy workloads. These workloads stressed a 16-core HP DL 580 server to approximately 60 percent CPU utilization and pushed an average of over 5,000 IOPS to the attached NetApp storage array. This throughput was maintained while the average latency stayed under 220 milliseconds and 95th percentile latency remained under one second. Fibre Channel provided the best performance with the lowest
CPU utilization. NFS and iSCSI performance was comparable with slightly longer latencies, and slightly higher CPU utilization.

WE RECOMMEND

New features in Exchange 2010 SP2 in videovMotion architecture, Performance and best practices in VMware vSphere 5VMware View 5.0 - performance and best practices white paperHow to configure FreeNAS 8 for iSCSI and connect to ESX(i)New PDF – Best practices for NFS

Vladan SEGET

Vladan is an Independent consultant, vExpert, VCP and owner of this website. This website ESX Virtualization started as a bookmarking site, but very fast found itself many readers and supporters. Feel free to network via Twitter @vladan

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