Virtualizing Exchange Mixed Messages from Microsoft, VMware

The release of this article at You had me at EHLO (aka Exchange blog team) and the previous links from VMware’s Virtualized Exchange discussions. Seems to be almost too coincidental that Microsoft’s Exchange blog published an article about virtualizing Exchange on Hyper-V a few days after VMware mades posts and hosted a discussion concerning Exchange. Microsoft’s conclusion is also completely contradictory from VMware’s findings. One says only do this in small environments, the other says we just virtualized 16,000 mailboxes and it is great. First thought is someone is misleading the reading public.

Then my profound (at least in my own mind) thought was no this makes total sense. Microsoft admits that Hyper-V is unable to run Exchange 2007 at an Enterprise level, but it is fine for small offices. VMware (and many storage partners) has proven Exchange can run just fine for large environments in ESX.

So the conclusion for today is this:
1. Hyper-V is not ready. (I am not the first person to say this.) Not just because they can not live migrate a VM. Hyper-V will have to live in the lab for a while longer.

2. VMware ESX is able to live in production environments for the big and small. It would seem VMware is still years ahead of the big guns at MS. So 2009 might not be the year for VMware to watch out for Microsoft. Maybe 2011.

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