Exchange 2003 on ESXi 4.1

[glenimp617]

Hi all,

We are migrating our exchange 2003 physical server (1,000 mailboxes, 500GB data across multiple stores) to VM Land.

The host is a Dell R710 Dual Quad Core Xeon sat on a Fibre SAN

Now, this server is only going to be temporary (six months ish) while we work on building another exchange solution to host numerous companies across the UK. Anyway, we are working on the temp one for now as the physical server is in a right state and it needs doing ASAP. We are not going down to P2V route, this will be added into the existing org and we will migrate the mailboxes across.

I've read the white paper from VMware and it sounds pretty straight forward to me. Just wondering if anyone had an immediate thoughts.

Obviously RAM is going to have to be 4GB since its Exchange 2003 but does anyone have an ideas about setting up the SAN or CPU resources.

Thanks very much,
Glen.
p.s. It will be on Windows Server 2003

 

[glenimp617]

Thanks very much for your quick replies guys,

I'm quite new to this (VMware and SANs), could someone quickly explain to me about vCPUs. I've read the VM paper twice today and still can't get my head around it. I know that with 1,000 mailboxes I only need one CPU but that's about it. Thanks!!!

p.s. I think a vCPU is like a CPU to the VM but ESXi allocates it resources from the actual CPUs. is that right?

 

[glenimp617]

ah ok, thanks

and last question...what about the LUNs

I'm reading different things about the LUNs for OS, pagefile, exchange, database and logs

 

[glenimp617]

Thanks very much guys,

would you recommend RAID-10 array for the DB and a seperate RAID-10 for the logs?