High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Exchange Using VMware® Infrastructure 3
Put your Exchange server on VMware® Infrastructure 3, the ideal platform for today’s dynamic messaging environments. Leverage the power of virtualization for your messaging and see how you can easily adapt to changing workloads, scale as your organization grows, and gain protection against common outages that can impact e-mail servers and disrupt communications. Get increased flexibility and improve availability while reducing complexity and costs. VMware® Infrastructure 3 decreases hardware requirements and management costs of running an Exchange infrastructure in production, disaster recovery, and test/development environments.
Support for Exchange Running in a VMware Environment
There are several scenarios in which customers running Microsoft Exchange Server on VMware platforms receive support for this application today. Customers routinely tell VMware that they receive the Microsoft support benefits that they are accustomed to. Support options vary, however, depending on how customers purchase VMware and Microsoft products.
Scenario #1: VMware software was originally purchased through a server OEM
Server resellers including Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, IBM, and Unisys offer end-to-end support for Microsoft software running on their servers and VMware if VMware products are purchased with the server hardware and are covered by a valid support agreement with the server reseller. This provides customers one-stop support via the server reseller if an issue arises. See Support for Microsoft Software in VMware Virtual Machines for more details.
Scenario #2: VMware software was originally purchased direct from VMware or a VMware authorized reseller and the customer has a valid Microsoft Premier-level support agreement
Microsoft states that it will use “commercially reasonable efforts” to support its products running on VMware virtual machines. Customers regularly tell us that Microsoft’s commercially reasonable efforts are effective and appropriate to maintain operations as planned.
There may be confusion within Microsoft’s field and channel organizations regarding the scope of support that can be provided, and in some cases, customers may perceive that “commercially reasonable efforts” will not meet their expectations. In general, Microsoft offers its large customers excellent support for their products running on VMware.
Microsoft’s policy states that after such efforts are exhausted, Microsoft support specialists may request that customers replicate the issue on a physical machine in order to proceed with the investigation. This request to replicate issues on alternative hardware (physical or virtual) is used to verify that the problem exists in the Microsoft software rather than in the underlying platform. See Microsoft KB 897615 for more details.
Scenario #3: VMware software was originally purchased direct from VMware or a VMware authorized reseller and the customer does not have a Microsoft Premier-level support agreement
Microsoft’s level of support for these customers can be more restrictive. Before providing support, Microsoft specialists may request that customers first replicate the issue on a physical machine per Microsoft KB 897615. The recently announced Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program will create a framework for VMware and Microsoft “to offer cooperative technical support to customers running Windows Server on validated, non-Windows server virtualization software”.
Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange Server
Learn the benefits of using management tools and distributed infrastructure services to help make your Microsoft Exchange servers more responsive to the ebb and flow of email traffic.
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