The topic of hardware virtualization has generated much inter-
est in the Windows community
recently. Hardware platforms have
become more accommodating of the
demands of software that’s running in
a virtual server, and virtualization
software has become more mature
and functional. However, you shouldn’t
simply run out and install Windows
Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003
on a virtualization platform such as
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Release
2 (R2) or VMware Server. There are
performance considerations, support
limitations, and deployment issues
that you have to take into account
before you can virtualize any part of
Exchange 2003 within a production
messaging environment.
In a two-part article that begins
here, I’ll explore some of the benefits
of virtualization, Microsoft’s support
limitations, virtual machine (VM) performance considerations, and deployment issues that you need to think
about before you virtualize any part of
Exchange 2003 in a production environment. . . .
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