| Virtualization support for Exchange Server is there now for a bit long time, and after the release of Exchange Server 2010 we have seen many organization did virtualized their Exchange Servers. In a general perspective virtual machine are tend to be 20% slower than a physical server machine, and on top of this if proper planning and sizing exercise for the required underlying infrastructure, has not taken place then there are chances that virtual machine might hit for the performance issues. When it comes to Hyper-V we see tremendous amount of lacking in the planning and design of the virtualized platform, because Hyper-V is one of the server role available in Windows Server, people just go and start using it without building the solid foundation to provide efficient virtualization platform for their virtualized workloads.Recently I got a chance to encounter with a client, who was massively into Hyper-V business, and have virtualized majority of their IT infrastructure and services with Hyper-V Windows Server 2008 R2. Like all other IT services and application, their Exchange messaging infrastructure has also been virtualized with Hyper-V.Exchange Server (VMs) Client Server Performance Problem:
As an initial diagnose, we found that Hyper-V infrastructure which was configured as Hyper-V Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster, was missing required hotfixes for Hyper-V clustering, manageability, and performance.As a solution we installed required OS level patches for Hyper-V and Microsoft Clustering Services, and we found that performance problem got resolved and Exchange Server virtual machines started behaving in a more better way. The same solution we provided to all other Hyper-V based virtual machines, like SAP, FIM, and etc we found favorable response for improving the overall performance of these applications. Below is the summary of different type of OS level Hyper-V and Microsoft Clustering hotfixes for Hyper-V based Virtual Machines. Hyper-V Hotfixes for Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) VMs Failover Cluster Hotfixes for Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) VMs Hyper-V Hotfixes for Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM (Plain) VMs Hyper-V Hotfixes for Windows Server 2008 RTM (Without R2) VMs Hope this article would help you to fix your virtualized Exchange performance issues for Hyper-V based VMs. Cheers! |
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