I'm curious if anyone is running EV in a virtualized production environment and how your experience has been. We performed our EV8 beta testing on a Win2k8 Hyper-V host and it worked well. However, we did not simulate anywhere near the load that the production boxes handle. If you have time to reply to this, please include such details as your EV version, virtualization platform, host hardware, guest config, storage, etc.

I ran EV 7.5 and now run 8.0 in VMWare ESX Server 3.5 cluster.The cluster consists of three machines with 32GB of RAM and 8 cores each.The VM that hosts EV is configured with 2 CPU's and 3GB of RAM. Symantec recommends that you have at least 4GB of RAM, but my setup seems to run fine with 3GB. My EV database is on a cheap DELL NAS with 8TB of total storage. So far, it runs extremely well and I've had no problems. The particular cluster that EV runs on is also home to 35 other virtual servers, some of which are much more resource intensive than EV. In my opinion, EV runs just fine in a virtualized environment which is set up correctly and you should have no problems.

Thanks for the quick reply, BitBucket! Couple follow-up questions:Are you running EV8 on Win2k3 or Win2k8? (if 2k3, 32 or 64-bit?)Are you archiving exchange, file system, etc? If exchange, how many mailboxes are you archiving?

I'm running EV8 on Win2k3 64-bit. I'm archiving Exchange 2003, file system and Sharepoint. Exchange has about 150 users and the file system is handling about 600 GB.Sharepoint is relatively small right now with maybe 50 GB. I will be migrating to Exchange 2007 soon which I hope will go smoothly in regards to EV.

Hello Andrew, BitBucket, We're running EV7.5SP2, windows2003SP1 Ent.Ed., Exchange 2003 SP1I believe our VM environment is the same as mentioned here previously. We're running 9 journalarchiving servers, 15 mailboxarchivingservers in VM. Obviously, the Index and Store disks are physicaldisks (SAN). MSMQ however is also on a virtual disk. Our archiving servers were physically 4 processor, 4 gb ram, but now are 2 processor, 1.5gb ram (as VM-machine). Archiving is keeping up as it did when running on physical hardware! We have 75.000 mailboxes being archived, with an average of 25.000 mails a day..Exchange and SQL are and will remain on physical hardware. I heard a document about virtualizing and performance will be published by Symantec in a few months orso Although I was scpetic in the beginning, I have to say that EV runs as good or better than it did before virtualizing. This probably depends on the underlying hardware, but results are good. Been running virtualized for akmost 2 months now. GJ

We are running EV 7.5SP2 for nearly 2500 Users under ESX 3.5.We have 800GB Mail store and 80GB Index The VM is configured with 2 vCPUs and only 2GB of RAM. We made about 800GB PST Migrations on this machine also during work days. The system was sometimes a bit overloaded (100% CPU over 12hours) but we never had complaints from our users ;-) It is running really well. Marc

Have You Virtualized EV?

15 Replies

BitBucket
Level 4
17 years ago
I ran EV 7.5 and now run 8.0 in VMWare ESX Server 3.5 cluster.
The cluster consists of three machines with 32GB of RAM and 8 cores each.
The VM that hosts EV is configured with 2 CPU's and 3GB of RAM. Symantec recommends that you have at least 4GB of RAM, but my setup seems to run fine with 3GB. My EV database is on a cheap DELL NAS with 8TB of total storage.

So far, it runs extremely well and I've had no problems. The particular cluster that EV runs on is also home to 35 other virtual servers, some of which are much more resource intensive than EV.

In my opinion, EV runs just fine in a virtualized environment which is set up correctly and you should have no problems.
AndrewB
Moderator
17 years ago
Thanks for the quick reply, BitBucket! Couple follow-up questions:
Are you running EV8 on Win2k3 or Win2k8? (if 2k3, 32 or 64-bit?)
Are you archiving exchange, file system, etc? If exchange, how many mailboxes are you archiving?
BitBucket
Level 4
17 years ago
I'm running EV8 on Win2k3 64-bit.

I'm archiving Exchange 2003, file system and Sharepoint.

Exchange has about 150 users and the file system is handling about 600 GB.
Sharepoint is relatively small right now with maybe 50 GB.

I will be migrating to Exchange 2007 soon which I hope will go smoothly in regards to EV.
GertjanA
Moderator
17 years ago
Hello Andrew, BitBucket,

We're running EV7.5SP2, windows2003SP1 Ent.Ed., Exchange 2003 SP1
I believe our VM environment is the same as mentioned here previously. We're running 9 journalarchiving servers, 15 mailboxarchivingservers in VM. Obviously, the Index and Store disks are physicaldisks (SAN). MSMQ however is also on a virtual disk. Our archiving servers were physically 4 processor, 4 gb ram, but now are 2 processor, 1.5gb ram (as VM-machine). Archiving is keeping up as it did when running on physical hardware! We have 75.000 mailboxes being archived, with an average of 25.000 mails a day..
Exchange and SQL are and will remain on physical hardware.

I heard a document about virtualizing and performance will be published by Symantec in a few months orso

Although I was scpetic in the beginning, I have to say that EV runs as good or better than it did before virtualizing. This probably depends on the underlying hardware, but results are good. Been running virtualized for akmost 2 months now.

GJ
Marc_Lueckert
Level 3
17 years ago
We are running EV 7.5SP2 for nearly 2500 Users under ESX 3.5.
We have 800GB Mail store and 80GB Index

The VM is configured with 2 vCPUs and only 2GB of RAM. We made about 800GB PST Migrations on this machine also during work days. The system was sometimes a bit overloaded (100% CPU over 12hours) but we never had complaints from our users ;-)

It is running really well.

Marc
EV_Guru
Level 4
17 years ago
I saw many many installations of EV, some were virtualized some not. It's allways the same, it depends on how much you are using your archive and how much load the EV servers get.

Everyone will agree, then a heavy used system should allways be a physical one, like Exchange and so on...

When you have for example 5000 Exchange Users on 1 EV Server it's better to have a physical one, because their are allways faster. But in some enviroments it is enough to have a virtual one, but this depends on your requirements to the EV archive.

This can be checked during the Storage, Archive etc. calculations during the implementing phase of a project...

_________________

www.longerich.com
EDU
Level 4
16 years ago
I'm also looking at virtualizing EV.

What has anyone done in terms of performance testing before moving to VMs in production?

Regards,
Ethan
GertjanA
Moderator
16 years ago
Hello Ethan,

We did not do performance testing in a VM. We did take some performance monitoring of some of the heaviest used EV-servers when they were physical machines. We decided to start of with 2 cpu's and 1.5 GB RAM on the VM's, and upgrade if necessary.

We found that we only needed to upgrade one VM (to 3 GB RAM , 4 processors) to be able to keep up with journal archiving. The rest is running BETTER than the physical ones.

The exact difference between physical and virutal i do not exactly know, but the underlying vm-gardware is better. We're running VM since okt/nov 2008, and without problems.

Physical was converted to virtual. Physical machines were kept for 4 weeks, so in the event of not performing/other severe issues, we would have been able to return to the old situation (physicals) without problems.

Regards
jprknight-oldax
Level 6
16 years ago
We did the same kind of thing with GertjanA, no particular performance testing. I want to echo what GertjanA said about the performance, the VMs are giving BETTER performance than the physical counterparts.

We did not keep our physical machines so long as they were unstable and not even suitable for a disaster recovery scenario, let alone to run the entire production environment on.
EDU
Level 4
16 years ago
In my discussions with our VMWare team, I asked about using SAN disk for the indexes and MSMQ, but was told it shouldn't be necessary because the VMs would reside on fast SAN storage anyway.

Does anyone have any advice on the matter?

-Ethan