New technical PDF showing Microsoft Exchange Server performance on VMware Virtual SAN. Many customers runs Microsoft Exchange locally at their datacenters and wonder how Exchange would perform. I think the paper comes just in time to show that VSAN can considerably accelerate the Exchange Workflows.
The paper is written by Jinpyo Kim (staff engineer in the Performance Engineering team at VMware) and Tuyet Pham (senior member of technical staff in the Performance Engineering team at VMware). The tested version of Exchange was an Exchange 2010 spread through several VMs and different scenarios were tested by increasing number of VMs to support up to 20 000 Exchange users. Each time a latency tests were conducted.
Three scenarios going from 3VMs configured for CAS (client access role) and 3 VMs configured for HT (Hub transport role), then 4 and 5 VM. The number of vCPUs in theses scenarios are configured as 24, or 32 or 40 in each VM for each different scenario.
Here is the test scenario:
Quote:
VMware performance testing shows that Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on Virtual SAN clusters scales well without affecting much user-perceived application latency as more Exchange users are deployed with added VMware Virtual SAN hosts.
How the tests were done? By using Exchange Workload Generator Utility called LoadGen:
Note: LoadGen tool for Exchange 2010 can be downloaded from this link at Microsoft's site.
LoadGen was configured to simulate Outlook 2007 online clients using the LoadGen very heavy user profile with 150 messages sent and received per day, per user. Each mailbox user was nitialized with 100MB of data in the mailbox before starting the tests. LoadGen tests include a variety of Exchange transactions and were run for an 8 hour period to represent a typical workday.
Quality of Service (QoS) is determined by Industry consensus, which indicates that testing should focus on the 95th-percentile transaction latency of the Sendmail transaction to measure mailbox performance. The value of this result, which represents the maximum time needed to send an email for 95% of the transactions, should be reported below 500 milliseconds (ms) to represent an acceptable user experience.
The paper can be downloaded from this VMware blog post.
