In my previous post, “Reasons to Virtualize Your Email Servers – Part 1 of 2”, I enumerated three reasons for virtualizing email servers. There are many more reasons why administrators and organizations would want to virtualize their email servers that I will discuss now.

Here are three of those reasons which I discussed in my previous post on why administrators and organizations would want to virtualize their email servers:

1. Understand and learn a new technology.
2. Better use of resources.
3. Lower software licensing costs.Here then are five more reasons for companies and organizations to virtualize their email servers.
4. When your company virtualizes their email servers they are reducing the number of physical boxes that they have to keep and maintain. Email administrators often manage, and administer, other machines besides their email servers. And if your IT department runs as a profit and loss center then administrators should be very interested in reducing the number of boxes they have to administer if they know that they are going to benefit financially. When there are fewer boxes to maintain then your costs are lower. Fewer boxes mean lower cooling costs. Fewer boxes also mean lower power costs as well. Lower power and cooling costs is most likely a part of your company’s goals for a greener environment.
5. Virtual email servers also mean lower hardware costs. Having fewer hardware boxes obviously results in a lot of savings to your company and to your IT department. This can free up money to be used for new software tools or applications for IT administrators and email administrators to deploy within their environment as needed.
6. One of the biggest benefits that you get when you virtualize your email servers is that you – as an email administrator – get more flexibility when it comes to managing the resources that you need to get the best performance out of your email servers. A virtualized server can have resources dynamically added to their operating profile to accommodate unexpected spikes in utilization. Virtual CPUs, memory and even I/O adapters can be added or removed from your virtual email server’s operating profiles as needed. In some virtual environments it is even possible to define different profiles for the same virtual server such that an administrator can switch to whichever profile fits the resource needs of the current utilization rate. Having this flexibility to have a dynamic virtual server can be a great benefit to administrators especially for changing email server loads or when balancing the loads across multiple email servers is not possible. Simply change the amount of resources of the virtual email server to adjust for heavy or light workload requirements as needed.
7. Virtualization of email servers makes it possible to run different versions of Outlook or Exchange in different operating systems. Email administrators can even fine tune those email environments by specifying the different rev levels of the operating systems. Email administrators could test new versions of Outlook or Exchange Server on different virtual servers all within the same physical box. Then, when it is convenient for them, they could roll out the newer versions of Outlook or Exchange into their virtual production environment without needing to reload the OS or the email software onto a different physical box. Simply flip the software switch on their virtual email servers and they are now live in a much shorter amount of time than if they had needed to test, stage and go live on multiple physical boxes.
8. I’ve already discussed the savings in power and cooling that can be realized when going to a virtual email server environment. But there are other infrastructure advantages as well. The number of I/O adapters is reduced which also can reduce the amount of cables and switches that are needed in your data center thus further reducing your overall IT costs. Then there are rack space requirements that can also be reduced. And the assorted peripherals such as video, mouse and keyboards that are needed is also reduced in a virtual email server(s) environment.

In summary, it is very easy to see the advantages for moving your email servers to virtual email servers. The gains that can be realized in maximizing your resource utilization rates, flexible use of resources, operating costs and cost savings in hardware and software should be very easy for email administrators to demonstrate when presenting the virtual email servers advantage to upper management.

More and more companies are learning about virtualization technologies. And there are a lot of companies that have already gone from a dedicated server environment to a virtualized server setup in their data center.

Companies, IT directors, their staff and administrators are all considering the advantages and disadvantages of virtual server technology and whether it is the right choice for their company. There are many reasons to go to a virtual environment. And when going to a virtual environment a frequent question is which of our servers would benefit from being virtualized?

Email servers are great candidates for virtualization. If your organization is small then you are probably already running your email server or servers on small boxes with a certain amount of CPU, memory and disk drives. One of the parameters to look at when considering a virtual server is to ask the question: what is the current CPU utilization of my existing email server?

Typically, most data centers are running their email servers at anywhere from 20 to 25 percent of CPU utilization. If that is the case for your company, and you have other servers also running at 20 to 25 percent, or less, then you are a good candidate for an email server virtualization effort.

And what does it mean to virtualize my server? In short, a server virtualization means that we are consolidating one or more existing servers onto one physical frame or box. Each of the virtual servers gets their own allocation of virtual CPUs, memory, disk storage and I/O adapters. A combination of software and firmware performs the distribution and balancing of those resources among the virtual servers that have been defined on the physical frame or box. Usually a hypervisor is involved as a sort of traffic cop for distributing those resources.

Continue reading 3 Reasons to Virtualize Your Email Servers – Part 1 of 2

One of the great benefits for us in IT is that as hardware and storage prices have come down, and performance has increased, we are more able to offer services that in the past was prohibitively expensive to deliver. Rapid deployment and expansion of service, redundancy, and very high availability are all possible now for a fraction of the cost of a few years ago. Granted, it still costs more to provide such high quality service. Let’s take a look at how virtualization, replication and high availability, impact storage requirements and costs.

Virtualization allows us to deploy servers without tying resources to a single specific hardware system. The images can be moved from one system to another, cloned, made redundant and thereby easily allow expansion of particular applications and services. Virtual servers are a foundation for simple, rapid, consistent scalability. Having several or many identical instances allows us to deliver high availability far more easily. Virtual images do take space, and must run on a base platform, so clearly a single VM takes more space and resources that the same service running on dedicated hardware.

High Availability (HA) is the IT goal of having continuously available service for a particular application, connection or resource. Sometimes this is done via fail-over from a primary to a secondary connection or resource. It is also possible via load balancing. The load balancing can be accomplished at the application layer, at a gateway layer, or via an appliance. Load balancing is also possible at the name lookup level. For the purposes of this discussion we are considering application, gateway, and appliance types of load balancing and fail-over. Application layer mail gateway routing is often built-in to the system, whereby the gateway has alternate choices to try if its primary gateway is unavailable. This may be implemented in different ways depending on the vendor and the service. For SMTP there are underlying standards and requirements for gateway and routing behavior.

Continue reading Virtualization, Replication, Storage and High Availability

Can you make your email greener? Possibly.

With the release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a virtualized Exchange 2007 SP1 server is no longer restricted to the realm of the lab; it can be deployed in a production environment.

So says Microsoft in the Exchange Team Blog. Yup, it’s now possible to virtualize Exchange Servers while continuing to be entitled to support from Microsoft. But there’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that virtualizing Exchange can offer real savings. In one of the examples that Microsoft cite (with 7 servers being consolidated to 3 servers running 7 virtual servers) the potential energy savings are estimated at 25,754 kWh or $22,516 per year. On top of that, there’s also savings to be had on hardware and, if your utility company has a high tech incentive program (as PG&E do) you may even be able to recover a portion of your project costs. Woohoo! So, not only can you cut your costs, but you can make your operations a bit greener in the process.

But here’s the bad news. As Microsoft put it, “Due to the performance and business requirements of Exchange, most deployments would benefit from deployment on physical servers.” What that really means is that most Exchange deployments will not be suitable candidates. Microsoft provide the following 3 scenarios in which virtualization is worth considering:

• Small Office with High Availability
• Remote or Branch Office with High Availability
• Mobile LAN

Continue reading Greening Exchange Server