Exchange 2010 DAG + VMWare HA = no support?
- by Dan
We currently have an Exchange 2003 clustered environment (two machine cluster) that we're looking to upgrade to 2010. We recently purchased a VMWare virtualization environment (three Dell R710's with an EMC NS-120 serving up NFS datastores - iSCSI is available) that we wish to use for this new environment. I'm seeing that Microsoft does not support Exchange 2010 DAGs with a virtualization high availability solution (see links below). I would like to utilize the DAG to ensure the data stays available if one host goes down, and HA to ensure that if the physical host goes down, the VM will come back up on the other available host.
Does anybody know why MS does not
support this? VMWare HA will only restart the VM if it is hung/down - I don't see any difference between this and restarting the physical box if someone pulled the power...
Will we only run into issues with
support if it has something to do
with HA/DAG failover or will they see
we have HA and tell us to put it on a
physical box even if it has nothing to do
with HA?
If we disable HA for these VM's will
that satisfy them on a support case?
Has anybody set up an Exchange 2010
DAG on VMware with HA enabled?
Will they have any issues with using an NFS datastore? We have much greater flexibility on the EMC with NFS vs iSCSI, so I would prefer to continue utilizing that.
Thanks for any input!
http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2010/01/verifying-microsoft-exchange-2010.html
Take a look at the second image under "Not Supported"
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx
"Microsoft doesn't support combining Exchange high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions. DAGs are supported in hardware virtualization environments provided that the virtualization environment doesn't employ clustered root servers."
