Well, MS allows you to do these things but they are very limiting. Many people want to use Hyper-V and ESX for Live Migration/Vmotion/Etc but MS will not support it. Microsoft may still support your entire solution, just not that specific aspect of it.

For example, check out this bullet (What is the support policy for additional functionality of virtualization products? ) from the following: http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvpsupport.htm

In the same article :
“Microsoft does not support combining Exchange clustering solutions (namely, cluster continuous replication (CCR) and single copy clusters (SCC)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability or migration solutions (for example, Hyper-V’s quick migration). Both CCR and SCC are supported in hardware virtualization environments provided that the virtualization environment does not employ clustered root servers.”

AND

“Virtual disks that dynamically expand are not supported by Exchange.”

This is exactly what I have right now for my Exchange 2k7 SP1 deployment on ESX 3.5U4. Never any problem with it. I am running a SCC cluster, but wanted to move to CCR to avoid the iSCSI shared storage requisite. You need dymanically expanding disks, you need storage-on-demand. Alltogether it seems it has no positive effect on the MS support policy either.

Another point “… configured at the host level and dedicated to one guest machine.”

So block level devices cannot take advantage of Hyper-V Live Migration or HA features. Is that the correct conclusion ?

So avoid Exchange on Hyper-V is what MS is saying ? Same counts for SQL 2005/2008 I suppose ?

BR,

Ronald

The storage used by the Exchange Server guest machine can be virtual storage of a fixed size (for example, fixed virtual hard drives (VHDs) in a Hyper-V environment), SCSI pass-through storage, or Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage. Pass-through storage is storage that is configured at the host level and dedicated to one guest machine. Pass-through volumes must be presented as block-level storage to the hardware virtualization software, because Exchange 2007 does not support using network attached storage (NAS) volumes.

Bit of topic, but I heard that for creating a VM based Windows 2008 cluster on Hyper-V you need iSCSI for the shared storage part and you cannot use directly Fibre Channel (as you can in VMWare). Any idea how to make this perform well ? Can you create Hyper-V VMs with a 10G NIC orso ? Or does Hyper-V R2 support direct storage access with fibre channel ?

Till now I see a 1Gbps connection for iSCSI to my mailstores no directly moving to production. Looking at the specs this seems to slow. Haven’t tried it though.

Hope you have an idea

BR,

Ronald Topp

Bit of topic, but I heard that for creating a VM based Windows 2008 cluster on Hyper-V you need iSCSI for the shared storage part and you cannot use directly Fibre Channel (as you can in VMWare). Any idea how to make this perform well ? Can you create Hyper-V VMs with a 10G NIC orso ? Or does Hyper-V R2 support direct storage access with fibre channel ?

Till now I see a 1Gbps connection for iSCSI to my mailstores no directly moving to production. Looking at the specs this seems to slow. Haven’t tried it though.

Hope you have an idea

BR,

Ronald Top

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