2007 SCR as VM

hypnotoad

Anyone using SCR on Ex2007 SP1? I am tempted to install a vmware virtual machine as the standby server.

Our main server is a dell poweredge 2950 w/ 12 gigs RAM, 200 gigs of mailboxes, 8 processing cores. I'm curious if I make a 'small' VM with 2 gigs of RAM and 2 cores if it will be able to keep up. Anyone think this is a bad idea?? Should I be using real hardware for the Standby machine?

royal

Use real hardware. If possible, try to use the same hardware as your main box. Also, get Outlook 2007 installed across the board. This way if your main server or cluster goes south, you can automatically point all your Outlook 2007 clients (thanks to autodiscover) to the SCR server for mailboxes using move-mailbox blahblah -configurationonly.

CoryS

I would really really recommend NOT virtualizing this in the event you need to provision that box for any production purposes you are probably going to see one heck of a hit (specially with the box you are describing to virtualize it on). I have labbed SCR using virtual machines for testing purposes but thats about as far as I would take it without a very large VM budget, even then you would be better served matching hardware if you needed to make this your replacement machine as it makes the restore mode for other roles that much less complicated. (pretty much agreeing with royal)