Microsoft announces enhanced hardware virtualization support for Exchange 2010

In November last year, VMware released a paper titled: Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide, on which Microsoft responded the week after by stating that Microsoft does not support combining Exchange high availability with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability or migration solutions which automatically failover mailbox servers.

Now Microsoft has announced enhanced hardware virtualization support for Exchange 2010 stating that it is now supported to combe Exchange 2010 high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers. The updated support guidance applies to any hardware virtualization vendor participating in the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), which includes VMware as well.

To further support this Microsoft released a paper titled: Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V. The paper which contains 38 pages details how to implement these scenario’s using Microsoft Hyper-V.