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Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) certified for 30k Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes

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Last year Nutanix announced we had successfully completed Microsoft Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) certification for Hyper-V, now I am pleased to announce we have continued our focus on giving customers choice to deploy business critical applications on any hypervisor, and have now achieved ESRP for our Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

I believe Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) and the Nutanix platform is a great choice for business critical applications such as MS Exchange as it gives all the benefits of virtualization, without the complexity of legacy hypervisors and management platforms.

For more information on the advantages of AHV specifically for MS Exchange see:  MS Exchange on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

The Nutanix listing on the Microsoft Exchange Solution Review Program can be found at the following URL for both Hyper-V and AHV.

Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) – Storage

The Nutanix Best Practice guide for MS Exchange on AHV is also due for release shortly, so stay tuned!

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4, Peak performance vs Real World – Exchange on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)

MS Exchange on Nutanix now a MS validated ESRP solution

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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.

Fight the FUD – Support for MS Exchange on Nutanix

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Its disappointing that some vendors have so little respect for customers time that they continue to spread FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) about other vendors products.

This post is for existing and future Nutanix customers to get the facts about support for MS Exchange on Nutanix.

First of all, Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) is not Network File System (NFS).

NDFS is a file system which presents storage to hypervisors (ESXi, Hyper-V and Acropolis Hypervisor) via industry standard storage protocols being iSCSI, SMB 3.0 and NFS.

Currently Microsoft do not support Exchange running with VMDKs hosted on NFS for Exchange deployments on vSphere, this is due to an outdated and baseless support policy which experts from almost every major storage vendor agree.

For more information see the below article:

Virtualizing Exchange on vSphere with NFS backed storage?

However Nutanix have a published KB providing full support for MS Exchange when running within VMDKs on NFS datastores.

Nutanix aims to provide an Uncompromisingly Simple solution for customers which gives them maximum flexibility/choice. As such, when deploying applications such as MS Exchange on Nutanix, how the application/s are deployed and what storage protocol they use is ultimately the customers choice.

The below are some of the benefits of this include:

  1. Running a standard platform and storage protocol for all workloads is a simple model which reduces the unnecessary complexity of multiple protocols and/or in-guest storage configurations.
  2. The customer has the choice to deploy in multiple configurations to suit their specific requirements
If you want to run a 100% Microsoft supported Exchange configuration on Nutanix you currently have two options:
  1. vSphere running iSCSI
  2. Hyper-V running SMB 3.0
  3. Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) running iSCSI (default)

If you understand that NFS datastores are not supported by Microsoft, but accept it is fully supported by Nutanix and you want to run Exchange in a VMDK on NFS datastores, then Nutanix will support for MS Exchange and Microsoft will provide commercially reasonable support directly or via TSAnet if the case needs to be escalated.

So there you have it, MS Exchange can be ran on Nutanix in 100% Microsoft supported configurations and Nutanix customers have the choice in how they wish to deploy with full support from Nutanix.

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