VMware has released a paper titled: Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide. The paper contains 69 pages and provides guidance on how to deploy Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere.
The document covers the following topics:
- ESX host best practices for Exchange
- Exchange performance on vSphere
- Exchange 2010 capacity planning
- Sizing examples for a standalone and clustered mailbox server (16K users)
- vSphere enhancements for deployment and operations
The document doesn’t cover design and sizing examples and availability and recovery options.
"…VMware recommends the following practices:
• Only allocate multiple vCPUs to a virtual machine if the anticipated Exchange workload can truly take advantage of all the vCPUs.
• If the exact workload is not known, size the virtual machine with a smaller number of vCPUs initially and increase the number later if necessary.
• For performance-critical Exchange virtual machines (i.e., production systems), try to ensure the total number of vCPUs assigned to all the virtual machines is equal to or less than the total number of cores on the ESX host machine…"