Storage Tailor Made for Hosting Virtualized Enterprise Microsoft Exchange 2010 Deployments
More enterprises than ever are ready to take the next step in their virtualization journey by virtualizing mission critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010. Yet taking Exchange 2010 virtual in enterprise environments involves much more than simply hosting Exchange on a powerful server and then hoping that the underlying storage is up to the challenge. HP's 15,000-mailbox Exchange 2010 reference architecture illustrates how storage arrays specifically designed for virtualization such as the HP 3PAR V400 are a necessity to meet the performance demands of virtualized enterprise Exchange 2010 deployments.
Taking Microsoft Exchange 2010 Virtual
The question as to whether or not mid-market and enterprise organizations are ready to virtualize mission critical applications has largely been answered. A survey released in October 2012 by the Enterprise Strategy Group found that 67 percent of these companies already virtualize "mission critical applications."
Yet what this survey did not address was which mission critical applications are being virtualized. Another analyst survey revealed that in a survey of 137 enterprises, the average virtualization adoption rate for most applications was 55 percent. However Microsoft Exchange's virtualization rate was only 45 percent.
DAGs, DAS and Virtual Specifications
Reasons for Exchange's slower virtualization adoption rate abound. Microsoft Exchange only became officially supported as a virtualized application a few years ago which contributed to its virtualization adoption delay. Even once it was supported, hypervisors had to mature to the point where they could allocate a sufficient number of CPUs and memory to each virtual machine (VM) hosting Exchange.
Further aggravating the situation, initial specifications for virtualizing Exchange were in the context of using Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and deploying Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs) for high availability.
DAGs are particularly appealing to those businesses looking for an alternative to SAN storage in order to create a highly available Exchange configuration. With the introduction of DAGs, organizations could put Mailbox servers in a group to host Exchange databases and then use DAGs to automate a database-level recovery from a failure on an individual server or database.
Yet while deploying DAGs on DAS offered high availability, DAS still limited how much capacity and performance the underlying storage could provide. Further complicating the situation and driving the need to virtualize Exchange is the inability of DAS to support advanced virtualization functions such as failover clustering.
Since many enterprises want the flexibility to scale their storage and offer failover clustering for Exchange 2010, they chose to wait until the following was available:
Powerful Servers Only Partly Meet Exchange 2010's Performance Needs
Microsoft's Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) has always provided guidelines on how vendors may test their storage when hosting Microsoft Exchange. But what is new in the Microsoft ESRP v3.0 update is that vendors may test their storage using Exchange 2010 hosted in a virtualized environment.
To assist vendors in this task, Microsoft provides in-depth sizing details to account for different user workload profiles and how those workload profiles map to the number of users per core in physical and virtual environments.
Using these guidelines hardware providers like HP can now accurately forecast how many virtual processors as well as how much memory each individual Exchange VM needs. Armed with this information, HP has been able to establish benchmarks as to how may Exchange VMs a physical HP server may host based upon the performance of its CPU and how much memory it has.
A recent HP technical white paper illustrates how the HP ProLiant BL460c server hardware meets and even exceeds these specifications that HP has established are needed to virtualize Exchange 2010. The ProLiant BL460c offers four (4) times as many CPU cycles and provides five (5) times as much memory as is recommended to host four (4) guest Exchange VMs.
The Storage Virtualization Dilemma
But powerful server hardware is only part of the equation that must be satisfied when virtualizing Exchange 2010 in enterprise environments. Enterprises also require storage solutions that meet Exchange 2010's performance requirements while accounting for the management of storage in virtualized environments and the changing nature of virtualized application workloads over time.
Virtualization makes manually managing and optimizing storage capacity and performance practically impossible because:
Optimizing an Enterprise Exchange 2010 Virtualization Deployment with the HP 3PAR V400
To optimize Exchange 2010's performance when it is initially virtualized, the HP 3PAR V400 first uses wide striping to distribute Exchange data across all hard disk drives (HDDs). In this way, Exchange can take advantage of the performance of all of the array's HDDs.
To then maintain Exchange's performance going forward without driving up storage costs, the HP 3PAR V400 uses two techniques. First, through its support of both nearline (NL) and high performance fibre channel (FC) HDDs and using its Adaptive Optimization feature, it can put the most frequently used blocks of Exchange data on FC HDDs and infrequently accessed blocks on NL HDDs. This ensures Exchange will continue to achieve high levels of performance without requiring more HDDs.
Second, HP 3PAR V400's capacity will eventually be consumed. Using its System Reporter software, enterprises can understand how existing HDDs are being used and then acquire the right type of HDDs for their Exchange deployment.
If they need more performance, they can acquire more FC HDDs. If they simply need more capacity, they can acquire more NL HDDs. In either case, HP 3PAR V400 will redistribute the data across the newly added HDDs and increase its own capacity even as it maintains and even improves Exchange's performance.
Finally the HP 3PAR V400 automatically optimizes Exchange's storage utilization over time. The HP 3PAR V400 uses its Thin Provisioning feature to only allocate capacity when Exchange actually stores data. Then when data such as old emails are deleted later on, the HP 3PAR V400's Thin Persistence feature reclaims that freed space and returns it to the array's available storage pool.
HP 3PAR V400 Tailor Made for Enterprise Exchange 2010 Virtualization
Enterprises want to move forward with plans for virtualizing Exchange 2010 but testing programs and powerful server hardware are not enough to guarantee success. Virtualization already creates unwieldy storage environments and when one factors in the performance overhead associated with Exchange 2010, enterprises are setting themselves up for failure unless they have the right storage solution in place to support it.
The HP 3PAR V400 is that solution. It provides the foundation upon which enterprises may build and deploy Exchange 2010 with the knowledge that they will get the performance they need Day 1 and the confidence that it can adapt to whatever capacity and performance demands Exchange may place on it in the future.
Taking Microsoft Exchange 2010 Virtual
The question as to whether or not mid-market and enterprise organizations are ready to virtualize mission critical applications has largely been answered. A survey released in October 2012 by the Enterprise Strategy Group found that 67 percent of these companies already virtualize "mission critical applications."
Yet what this survey did not address was which mission critical applications are being virtualized. Another analyst survey revealed that in a survey of 137 enterprises, the average virtualization adoption rate for most applications was 55 percent. However Microsoft Exchange's virtualization rate was only 45 percent.
DAGs, DAS and Virtual Specifications
Reasons for Exchange's slower virtualization adoption rate abound. Microsoft Exchange only became officially supported as a virtualized application a few years ago which contributed to its virtualization adoption delay. Even once it was supported, hypervisors had to mature to the point where they could allocate a sufficient number of CPUs and memory to each virtual machine (VM) hosting Exchange.
Further aggravating the situation, initial specifications for virtualizing Exchange were in the context of using Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and deploying Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs) for high availability.
DAGs are particularly appealing to those businesses looking for an alternative to SAN storage in order to create a highly available Exchange configuration. With the introduction of DAGs, organizations could put Mailbox servers in a group to host Exchange databases and then use DAGs to automate a database-level recovery from a failure on an individual server or database.
Yet while deploying DAGs on DAS offered high availability, DAS still limited how much capacity and performance the underlying storage could provide. Further complicating the situation and driving the need to virtualize Exchange is the inability of DAS to support advanced virtualization functions such as failover clustering.
Since many enterprises want the flexibility to scale their storage and offer failover clustering for Exchange 2010, they chose to wait until the following was available:
- A program for virtualizing Exchange 2010 on SAN storage
- Server and storage hardware that could satisfy Exchange 2010's virtualization specifications
Powerful Servers Only Partly Meet Exchange 2010's Performance Needs
Microsoft's Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) has always provided guidelines on how vendors may test their storage when hosting Microsoft Exchange. But what is new in the Microsoft ESRP v3.0 update is that vendors may test their storage using Exchange 2010 hosted in a virtualized environment.
To assist vendors in this task, Microsoft provides in-depth sizing details to account for different user workload profiles and how those workload profiles map to the number of users per core in physical and virtual environments.
Using these guidelines hardware providers like HP can now accurately forecast how many virtual processors as well as how much memory each individual Exchange VM needs. Armed with this information, HP has been able to establish benchmarks as to how may Exchange VMs a physical HP server may host based upon the performance of its CPU and how much memory it has.
A recent HP technical white paper illustrates how the HP ProLiant BL460c server hardware meets and even exceeds these specifications that HP has established are needed to virtualize Exchange 2010. The ProLiant BL460c offers four (4) times as many CPU cycles and provides five (5) times as much memory as is recommended to host four (4) guest Exchange VMs.
The Storage Virtualization Dilemma
But powerful server hardware is only part of the equation that must be satisfied when virtualizing Exchange 2010 in enterprise environments. Enterprises also require storage solutions that meet Exchange 2010's performance requirements while accounting for the management of storage in virtualized environments and the changing nature of virtualized application workloads over time.
Virtualization makes manually managing and optimizing storage capacity and performance practically impossible because:
- Storage virtualized by the hypervisor. The hypervisor now virtualizes this storage capacity and creates its own storage pool before allocating it to VMs on an ad hoc basis.
- Unpredictable mailbox storage growth. User mailboxes in virtualized Exchange 2010 deployments are allocated as much storage as they are forecast to need but which they may never use. This results in storage capacity being full provisioned but underutilized.
Optimizing an Enterprise Exchange 2010 Virtualization Deployment with the HP 3PAR V400
To optimize Exchange 2010's performance when it is initially virtualized, the HP 3PAR V400 first uses wide striping to distribute Exchange data across all hard disk drives (HDDs). In this way, Exchange can take advantage of the performance of all of the array's HDDs.
To then maintain Exchange's performance going forward without driving up storage costs, the HP 3PAR V400 uses two techniques. First, through its support of both nearline (NL) and high performance fibre channel (FC) HDDs and using its Adaptive Optimization feature, it can put the most frequently used blocks of Exchange data on FC HDDs and infrequently accessed blocks on NL HDDs. This ensures Exchange will continue to achieve high levels of performance without requiring more HDDs.
Second, HP 3PAR V400's capacity will eventually be consumed. Using its System Reporter software, enterprises can understand how existing HDDs are being used and then acquire the right type of HDDs for their Exchange deployment.
If they need more performance, they can acquire more FC HDDs. If they simply need more capacity, they can acquire more NL HDDs. In either case, HP 3PAR V400 will redistribute the data across the newly added HDDs and increase its own capacity even as it maintains and even improves Exchange's performance.
Finally the HP 3PAR V400 automatically optimizes Exchange's storage utilization over time. The HP 3PAR V400 uses its Thin Provisioning feature to only allocate capacity when Exchange actually stores data. Then when data such as old emails are deleted later on, the HP 3PAR V400's Thin Persistence feature reclaims that freed space and returns it to the array's available storage pool.
HP 3PAR V400 Tailor Made for Enterprise Exchange 2010 Virtualization
Enterprises want to move forward with plans for virtualizing Exchange 2010 but testing programs and powerful server hardware are not enough to guarantee success. Virtualization already creates unwieldy storage environments and when one factors in the performance overhead associated with Exchange 2010, enterprises are setting themselves up for failure unless they have the right storage solution in place to support it.
The HP 3PAR V400 is that solution. It provides the foundation upon which enterprises may build and deploy Exchange 2010 with the knowledge that they will get the performance they need Day 1 and the confidence that it can adapt to whatever capacity and performance demands Exchange may place on it in the future.
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