How would anyone go about running the sizing tool for an Exchange 2010 deployment on VMWare using iSCSI/NFS luns? Is there an alternative sizing tool? The tool goes into detail about disk sizes and speeds etc but all of this is too detailed if you're using an iSCSI lun hosted on something like a NetApp filer where the filesystem, spindles etc are hidden from the lun itself.

Hi Steve, Thanks for the info, I'm going through the NOW site. I guess if everything looks good after loadgen/jetstress its OK. When you say NFS is not supported (I believe this might be the case too), do you know of any exceptions? We're talking 600 mailboxes over two MBX servers so the load isn't exactly high...

I know of no exceptions, just a blacket "not supported"; Personally I see no reason why it shouldn't be supported (apart from Hyper-V with CIFS shares isn't.. which is a terrible justification) as for many NFS is the storage of choice above iSCSI, especially as it starts to get VAAI support. SteveSteve Goodman Check out my Blog for more Exchange info or find me on Twitter

In this case it would be presenting the disk to the OS via a vmdk file that resides on an NFS volume (in exactly the same was as the OS drives)

That is the scenario I assumed you meant. At the moment that's not supported. The requirements are here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx In particular, these statements are relevant: "All storage used by an Exchange guest machine for storage of Exchange data must be block-level storage because Exchange 2010 doesn't support the use of network attached storage (NAS) volumes. Also, NAS storage that's presented to the guest as block-level storage via the hypervisor isn't supported. The following virtual disk requirements apply for volumes used to store Exchange data:" I expect the support statement will change sometime after Windows Server 8, which supports VHDs on NAS (w/ SMB 2.2, IIRC), is released. SteveSteve Goodman Check out my Blog for more Exchange info or find me on Twitter

If you are a NetApp partner there should be sizing tools on the NOW website. In general though, an NFS export is not support for Exchange 2010, out of the two iSCSI storage is. If you're using the sizing calculator one option may be to make sure the spindle configuration / disk configuration is overridden to match the underlying aggregate/raid set, and also use the required IOPS from the calculator to ensure your array can provide sufficient IO. SteveSteve Goodman Check out my Blog for more Exchange info or find me on Twitter

Thanks - FYI the tool isn't available on the NOW site but is via their support/consultancy - they request the MS sizing spreadsheet then put it through their own.

Thanks - FYI the tool isn't available on the NOW site but is via their support/consultancy - they request the MS sizing spreadsheet then put it through their own.