Book – Virtualizing Microsoft Tier 1 Applications with VMware vSphere 4
I got the honor of talking with Charles Windom today. He is the author of “Virtualizing Microsoft Tier 1 Applications with VMware vSphere 4”
We were concerned about Exchange performance with our SAN being setup as a large aggregate of drives vs. discrete drives.
All the best practices I read specifically stated discrete drives for performance reasons with Exchange 2003. However our SAN is setup as a large aggregate of drives.
Sean Dehlinger of vmware set me up with Charles and in about 2 minutes I had the confirmation that I needed.. (Thanks Sean!)
Here is the feed back from Charles…
1. Exchange 2003 Database does lots of Random R/W’s to the LUN, if the LUN is not discrete then you will see delays. The Logs and C: Drive are doing more Sequential R/W’s and the LUN aggregate should be okay.
2. IF your using Exchange 2010 Database or Logs then the R/W’s are Sequential and LUN discreteness is a non-issue.
It was nice to talk to an true expert and I look forward to meeting him at vmworld 2010 or having him talk at our Phoenix event..
