vMotion Exchange, yay or nay?
It appears that statements have been made that since Exchange 2010 SP1 that VMWare vMotion is supported with Exchange DAGs. See this post from the Technet Blogs.
This article makes the statement that “To put it as simply as possible: if your hypervisor vendor supports their migration technology with Exchange 2010, then we support Exchange 2010 with their migration technology.”
Vmware also makes similar statement in their documentation. “Additionally, the use of live migration technology such as VMware vMotion™ is fully supported with Exchange 2010 DAGs.”
Recommendation
As someone who has been working with the Exchange products for a very long time I would still advice against live vMotion of your DAG members. If you look online, many people have experienced issues with DAG failover when using vMotion. But, I have also experienced Exchange copy queue backlogs and server performance degradation when live vMotions have been done. I feel that it is still ok to run Exchange on VMware if virtualization is your corporate standard, but it is always best to play it safe by shutting down a DAG member before moving it to another host to prevent any unintentional side effects.
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