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24hours link exchange promiss.

Ugh, I liked!…

MS state that Exchange 2007 is only supported on VMware (or any other virtualisation platform) if it is running SP1 and on Windows 2008.

VMware does NOT support Windows 2008 clustering in production in ESX 3.5 U3.

This seems to limit the options for Exchange 2007 deployment to a standalone server, SCR and LCR only. However, I am interested in implementing Exchange CCR for resilience. Since CCR doesn’t utilise shared storage it is a different type of cluster to the traditional failover MSCS and perhaps less complicated and presumably the issue VMware has is with the storage side. All the replication occurs at the Exchange level rather than storage. I assume that the level of testing VMware would have needed to complete to validate W2K8 MSCS was prohibitive – a case of vendor not supporting the configuration and hopefully not that it won’t work.

“1) SVVP currently only certifies up to 16GB RAM, so that means you are “limited” to 16GB for support. (does that means you can run 32GB and change back to 16GB when you call for support?)”

Anything is possible. I’m not advocating it but I know of a lot of customers that simply don’t tell Microsoft they’re running virtual. Again, with SVVP I really don’t see the need to do this since VMware is supported in production running the vast majority of Microsoft applications. No need to lie.

“2) VMware don’t seems to differentiate CCR from MSCS (even though it’s using majority node set with no quorum). So when you check the SAN HCL, you’ll notive that most arrays aren’t supporting MSCS (and by association, CCR). EMC is the notable exception.”

The independent SAN vendors do their own certifications for the arrays. The HCL gets updated all the time. MSCS is supported by VMware (and Microsoft) in the guest. CCR for Exchange is called out by Microsoft as a no-no. Most customers are finding that they prefer to just use HA built into VMware for the failover or Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for DR. If they’re using other virtualization solutions then there are 3rd party products that do similar things (except for the SRM part).

“Of course, there still the “fall-back” positions we put forward to clients;

a) Have a Platespin V2P one time use licence in your back pocket in case MS support ask for it to be reproduced physically

b) Most of our customers have Premier MS support anyway, which entitles them to best effort support anyway (correct me if I am wrong).”

This is the great thing about SVVP – you don’t need to have Premier level support anymore. Anyone that’s deploying on a SVVP certified platform, Premier-level or not, gets support. What’s even better is replication on physical only occurs if MS and VMware jointly can’t figure out what’s going on. Even before SVVP I’ve only seen 2 customers replicate back to physical to get the issue resolved. It’s very rare that MS doesn’t know what the issue is to start with.

I’ll let others reading comment on their real-world customer experience on getting denied support or not.

1) SVVP currently only certifies up to 16GB RAM, so that means you are “limited” to 16GB for support. (does that means you can run 32GB and change back to 16GB when you call for support?)

2) VMware don’t seems to differentiate CCR from MSCS (even though it’s using majority node set with no quorum). So when you check the SAN HCL, you’ll notive that most arrays aren’t supporting MSCS (and by association, CCR). EMC is the notable exception.

So ignoring 2), yes, it’s supported

Of course, there still the “fall-back” positions we put forward to clients;

a) Have a Platespin V2P one time use licence in your back pocket in case MS support ask for it to be reproduced physically

b) Most of our customers have Premier MS support anyway, which entitles them to best effort support anyway (correct me if I am wrong).

Does anyone have any real-world experiences where they were denied support due to breaching any of the above rules?

Dave