Using VMware High Availability and VMotion With Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Virtual Machines on Dell PowerEdge Servers

When running applications in a virtualized environment, such as VMware Infrastructure 3, there are new capabilities that are made possible by the virtualization layer. In some cases, it is these new capabilities that make the case for virtualization compelling enough for even performance intensive, mission critical applications like Microsoft Exchange Server. Dell engineers tested Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with VMware Infrastructure's VMotion (live migration) and VMware HA (high availability) and found that, when properly sized, the Exchange VMs continue to perform well during both a live migration from one physical server to another and also during a recovery from a server failure.