How to virtualize Exchange 2007

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Well, I’m going through my p2v exercise with my current employer and whilst I have p2v’d many servers I had not converted an exchange server before. Our exchange server is a single windows 2003 R2 x64 box with all the exchange roles installed on it, its not a complicated setup but for us it doesn’t need to be. So googling around I found quite a few horror stories of failed p2v attempts. So with a degree of uncertainty I planned for the exchange conversion. I started off my stopping and disabling these services on my exchange server (because of this obviously you need to carry this out within a maintenance window as exchange will be down for a couple of hours at least.) MS Exchange Active Directory Topology
MS Exchange File Distribution
MS Exchange Information Store
MS Exchange Mail SubmiRead More…

vSphere5 Storage Profiles

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Storage profiles in vSphere5 allow you to organise you storage within vSphere based upon its capabilities. vSphere includes some specific API’s that can detect a storage devices specific capabilities however not many storage devices support this function at the moment.
However you can also create user defined storage profiles which allow you to assign capabilities to datastores and then create storage profiles that you can link to the datastores capabilities. This allows you to ensure that your virtual machines get the storage capabilities that they need to perform within your own agreed SLA. In order to use storage profiles you need to decide what capabilities of your shared storage you want to use to segregate your vm’s with. For example you may have a SAN with a high speed SAS setRead More…