Hi, I am deploying Exchange 2010 but there are some limitations on the hardware which is available. So i am planning to have two VMs one on each stand alone HyperV host the host machine is having SATA Disks configured with RAID5. Each Exchange VM will have all the roles installed on DAG. There are around 175 email users who will be given MBXs on this setup. Is it Ok to use Fixed Disk VHDs for the exchange in this scenario? as i can't have Pass-Through Disk for these VMs due to disks limitations. Regards, Maqsood Maqsood Mohammed Senior Systems Engineer MCITP-Enterprise Admin & ITILv3 Foundation Certified

Hello It depends upon your database capacity of Exchange User mailboxes as you mentioned total you have 175 mailboxes Please check this link for best practice from Microsoft for exchange 2010 Virtualization http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2428 Its mentioned in the documentation Its recommended to separate your OS and Exchange logs, database on different partitions Thanks Mouzzam Hussain Visit to my Blog mouzzamh.wordpress.com

Thanks for the link i can see the following best practices from there for my scenario. "The storage used by the Exchange guest virtual machine for storage of Exchange data (for example, mailbox databases or Hub transport queues) can be virtual storage of a fixed size (for example, fixed VHDs in a Hyper-V environment)," "In a Hyper-V environment, each fixed VHD must be less than 2,040 GB." "Storage used by Exchange should be hosted in disk spindles that are separate from the storage that is hosting the guest virtual machine's operating system" So i will try to configure two separate RAID5 drives on the HyperV Host one for storing the Guest OS VHDs of Exchange and other for Exchange. Regards, Maqsood Maqsood Mohammed Senior Systems Engineer MCITP-Enterprise Admin & ITILv3 Foundation Certified

Hello yes you can do that always Microsoft recommends to have separate partitions for OS, logs, Databases make Separate VHDs for OS and Database Logs attached it to the VM.Thanks Mouzzam Hussain Visit to my Blog mouzzamh.wordpress.com

Hi, I got the following number of disks on the Host machines and i will configure it accordingly. 300 GB x 2 (RAID1) - Host OS & Applicaitons 1TB x 6 (RAID5) - VMs Storage So I will assign separate fixed VHDs for exchange Guest VMs. FixedDisk1 - OS FixedDisk2 - Exchange Databases FixedDisk3 - Logs How does that look like? Regards, MaqsoodMaqsood Mohammed Senior Systems Engineer MCITP-Enterprise Admin & ITILv3 Foundation Certified

Yes this is be a good configuration for your VHD later on if you have more database you need to have another disk from same partition to your VM.Thanks Mouzzam Hussain Visit to my Blog mouzzamh.wordpress.com

Hello yes you can do that always Microsoft recommends to have separate partitions for OS, logs, Databases make Separate VHDs for OS and Database Logs attached it to the VM.Thanks Mouzzam Hussain Visit to my Blog mouzzamh.wordpress.com