Hi,

I'm running an all-in-one Exchange 2013 server. This is supporting around 60 users who work in online mode with larger-than-average mailbox sizes.

The machine is running on ESX 5.1 and is spec'd with the following

4 x 2Ghz 
16GB memory
Disks on dedicated LUN on RAID10, 15K shared storage with 8GB FC.

Performance at desktops appears fine. However, I have been watching performance monitor and some stats look particularly high. For example (all using default scales):

Processor - Interrupts/Sec (Average) = 2,000 (min 1,150 - max 5,900)
Processor - % Processor time (Average) = 9 (min 0.005 - max 53.9)
Memory - Page Faults/sec (Average) = 1,300 (min 114 - max 13,800)
Memory - Page Reads/sec (Average) = 0.3 (min 0 - max 2)
Memory - Pool Paged Bytes (Average) = 379,240,000 (min 379,000,000 - max 379,322,000)
Memory - Pool NonPaged Bytes (Average) = 142,300,000 (min 142,180,000 - max 142,600,000)
Memory - Cache Faults/Sec (Average) = 34 (min 1 - max 446)

My concern is around the memory, particularly the page faults. Should I be concerned? if so, what is the best way to address this considering it's a VM. There is more memory in the host available, but I don't want to just throw memory at the problem if it will just mask the issue.

Comments/suggestions greatly appreciated.

Did you size the servers using?
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Exchange-2013-Server-Role-f8a61780

Use that and refer to:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn879084(v=exchg.150).aspx

As far as the VMware side I would check out their best practices and ensure you arent using dynamic RAM or over commiting CPUs etc...

Thanks for the reply and apologies for not responding sooner.

Yes, the server was spec'd according to the sizing guide. It has the recommended amounts of memory, disk speed, disk size and cpu.

I have also read the vmware guidance on Exchange 2013 and can confirm the host server is not over committed on any resources - the host has around 33% free memory (around 30GB free of 96GB total)

The Exchange server has a reservation on it's 16GB so no swapping going on.

Anyone else care to share their stats?