Performance of MailEnable as a guest under VMWare ESX 5

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pmnit
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon Jun 20, 2011 8:32 pm
Location: Louisville, KY

Performance of MailEnable as a guest under VMWare ESX 5

Post by pmnit »

Good afternoon fellow MailEnabler's. We are preparing to embark on a journey to purchase a new server to replace our 7 year old server. We currently host a single post office. ~50 active users with ~120 total mailboxes. Message store is running ~50GB (400,000 files). Because of extra filters and scripts, the current server with a quad core + HT CPU rarely falls below 50% utilization and spends a lot of it's time in the 80%-100% range. Sometimes, it gets so bogged down that there are delays in email handling. I would like to avoid this on the next email server.

So we are buying a new server that is a bit beefier.
The basic specs for the new server are:
Dell R730
Dual E5-2623 V3 CPU's (Total 8 Cores / 16 threads)
32GB RAM
PERC H730 (1GB)
5 X 1TB NLSAS drives in a RAID 10 (1 drive as a hot spare)
Intel i350 QP NIC
Windows Server 2012 R2 STD

I am trying to decide if I should run this on bare hardware (like the current system) or install ESX on the hardware and Put MailEnable on it as a guest and give it most if not all of the resources. Obviously, there will be a little bit of loss to the VM for overhead. But the benefit of putting this in a VM is the ability to take snapshots before upgrades/changes, and the ability to move the VM to another ESX server in the case of a hardware failure. I am just worried that the overhead from the Hypervisor (CPU, I/O) will be more than I am anticipating.

Has anyone done this? Is so what are your experiences with running MailEnable in a VM? Any "gotchas" I should be aware of?

pmnit
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon Jun 20, 2011 8:32 pm
Location: Louisville, KY

Re: Performance of MailEnable as a guest under VMWare ESX 5

Post by pmnit »

Anyone?

sagelike
Posts: 324
Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:58 am

Re: Performance of MailEnable as a guest under VMWare ESX 5

Post by sagelike »

You should be fine with this server.

I run ME with more than hundred domains and hundreds of mailboxes using an older Dell 1950 with 4 cores, 2 TB WD Enterprises drives and only 8GB of ram with Windows 2008 Server on top of ESXi 4. It's a little slow but works OK. I'm planning on migrating to a DL360 G6 with at least 16GB of RAM.

I would say your new box on ESXi should be able to handle ME with ease.

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