I am pleased to announce that Nutanix has successfully completed the Microsoft Exchange Solution Review Program requirements and are now listed as a validated solution at the following URL:

Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) – Storage

The solution shows a dual site 24,000 1GB Mailbox solution running on just 8 NX-8150 nodes. This is a very highly resilient solution with N+1 availability at each site allowing for full self healing and failover in the event of a node failure.

Nutanix is also the FIRST and only hyper-converged platform to be validated under ESRP, further strengthening our leadership in the market.

The performance testing (using Jetstress) was with the nodes at around 90% capacity with 8.5TB per node, proving that Nutanix provided great performance even when running at high utilization and where the working set far exceeds the SSD tier. This is key to a truly enterprise solution for a business critical application such as Exchange.

The solution is running on Hyper-V with SMB 3.0 on the underlying Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric. The same solution can also be deployed on vSphere or Acropolis Hypervisors using iSCSI in a fully supported configuration.

The above solution was validated without using Compression or Erasure Coding both of which improve performance and give significant capacity savings which allows for larger mailboxes. As a result, the Nutanix platform provides even more value than the ESRP submission shows.

If there was any doubt around if you should virtualize MS Exchange on Nutanix platform, the fact Nutanix is now validated by Microsoft should put your mind at ease.

Now you can move one step closer to a fully webscale datacenter by removing another application specific silo and enjoy improved resiliency/performance while reducing operational cost and complexity.