For many years, customers have been realising the benefits of file based storage from one or more of the many storage vendors offering NFS.

NFS makes a ton of sense for virtualization, and virtualizing Business Critical applications such as Exchange, along with the rest of a company’s servers, can be a great way to reduce complexity and save on CAPEX/OPEX.

However, some vendors, have licensing or support statements which make this more difficult than it needs to be.

One such vendor is Microsoft.

Microsoft currently don’t support Exchange running inside a VMDK on an NFS datastore, even though the VMDK is a virtual SCSI device and acts/performs the same as if it was on a block based LUN, such as FC/FCoE or iSCSI.

I decided to reach out to a bunch of great guys in the virtualization community to try and get some awareness of this issue, and get Microsoft to update the outdated and technically invalid support statement.

As a result, the following TechNet forum article has been posted

Support for Exchange Databases running within VMDKs on NFS datastores

There is also a suggestion in the Microsoft Product improvement forum on the same topic, which as a result of the communities efforts in the past few weeks, have seen it sky rocket to the #1 improvement suggestion to microsoft.

The post and voting can be found here.

Support storing Exchange datat on VMDKs on File shares (NFS/SMB)

So please check out these two articles, and vote and leave your comments in support of this issue. Supporting Exchange in VMDKs on NFS is a No lose situation for customers, and that is what it is all about!

Related Articles:

Integrity of Write I/O for VMs on NFS Datastores Series

Part 1 – Emulation of the SCSI Protocol
Part 2 – Forced Unit Access (FUA) & Write Through
Part 3 – Write Ordering
Part 4 – Torn Writes
Part 5 – Data Corruption