Even with all that horse power, they didn’t talk about network traffic running all exchange 2007 roles on the same box. I wonder how long one of these boxes takes to vmotion. Also I’d like to know the details on how they setup the luns and if they used vmdk files
We recently finished a large Exchange 2007 capacity test on VMware ESX Server 3.5. How large? Well, larger than anything ever done before on a single server. And we did it from start to finish in about two weeks.
We did this test because we have felt for a while that advances in processor and server technology were about to leave another widely-used and important application unable to fully utilize the hardware that vendors were offering. Microsoft has guidelines on what environment works well with Exchange, and a system with more than eight CPUs and/or 32GB of RAM is beyond the recommended maximums.
16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server – VMware VROOM!
I did some simliar testing to what they did, but only went up to 2000 users on a single VM on a single physical server. This is interesting becusae that is the size that they used for the individual VMs.
I tested the VMotion and found that it took about 6 and a half minutes for a 2000 user VM to move while under “Heavy” user stress. I also tested VMware HA recovery time. I have a blog entry here on the topic – http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/11%2F29%2F2007+-+Vmotion+and+HA+with+Exchange+VMs+-+Comments
What I would really like to know is how they were able to build and test all 16000 users in under two weeks. It takes LoadGen forever to initialize users!
Todd