Hi,

I am currently redesigning a customers small Hyper V Deployment and am looking for some advice on how to set up the Exchange storage.

Ive looked at TechNet and it seems to assume that you are using physical hardware when talking about storage although I may be reading it wrong.

My customer has 2 Hyper V hosts which are standalone at the moment. I plan to cluster these to make them more highly available.

The restriction I have is on the storage side, they are using a Dell server with a load of disks and FreeNas installed on it. It is configured in a RAID 6 across all disks and I wont be able to change this.

What would be the best way to set this up? I was thinking about just creating a separate VHDX disk which was going to house the Logs and Database presented to the host via iSCSI (not the guest)

What do you guys think?

I would use vhdx files for the logs and databases this has the least amount of overhead and is less complex (which in my opinion always the way to go if possible).  Make sure you run Jetstress and you can pull out the IOPS you need as well.

It is not supported to use Exchange on NAS, but if you're using iSCSI, it should be supported since iSCSI isn't NAS.

I don't know how you define "small", but what you're describing ought to handle the load for what I think of as a small system.  Yes, you'd want to create a LUN for the databases and transaction logs, and a VHDX should be fine.

If you want to be sure, download the Exchange 2013 Storage Calculator and test your configuration.