Scaling Microsoft Exchange in a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Environment

This paper describes the performance and scaling of an industry-standard Exchange application, Microsoft Load Generator (LoadGen), running in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 guests under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 using the KVM hypervisor. The host system was deployed on a Dell PowerEdge R710 G6 server equipped with 72 GB of RAM and comprising dual sockets each with a 2.53 GHz Intel Xeon E5540 (Nehalem) processor with support for hyper-threading technology, totaling 8 cores and 16 threads. This paper illustrates the ability of Red Hat virtualization to virtualize disk and network IO in both scale-up and scale-out scenarios.