More Microsoft Pro-DAS Jihadist FUD (and a counter)

Mr Perry Clarke has been at it again. http://blogs.technet.com/b/perryclarke/archive/2010/11/16/responding-to-migration-vs-in-place-upgrade-comments.aspx is his latest pro DAS, anti Virtualization and anti networked storage communique. This follows on from: http://blogs.technet.com/b/perryclarke/archive/2010/04/14/storage-performance-and-my-take-on-virtual-storage.aspx which has been taken apart in a number of forums over the past few months so I won't bother doing so here. It's getting to be depressingly routine but so long as he keeps saying things I get to talk to customers to tell them why you don't do something "just because" Microsoft tells you to and "just because" a Microsoft employee proffers an opinion.

If you want a strategic solution you put enterprise networked storage into your data centers. Depending on what your business requirements are you implement such a solution from one or more vendors. EMC and NetApp will tell you, it's all about your business and what business problem you are trying to solve and what service you are trying to deliver to the rest of the business to enable them to work more efficiently and with greater productivity. You don't abandon a strategy "just because" an employee at a company who doesn't do storage says one of your applications should be done the way he likes. Thinking in a silo'd manner is several years out of date and the Microsoft Exchange product group do themselves a gross disservice by continuing to do so. Please, if you see something from them that says anything other than "large, low cost mailboxes" or you encounter a sales rep or MCS consultant that says anything else or recommends DAS please email me with their name and you can be hooked up with the official line, direct from Microsoft. (I won't even get involved!)

Similarly virtualization is a solution to a business problem. Do it or don't do it, it doesn't really matter to me as an applications professional working for a storage company. But if you do implement it there are some things you are going to want to think about. If you do implement a virtualization platform there's a good chance that your requirement for a highly available infrastructure didn't just go away. There's every chance you want both. There's every chance you want to have highly available guest servers as well as a highly utilized host server environment. So would you put the data onto disks internal to the host? Sure, if your guests had no high availability requirement. But only if. If you need that data highly available you're going to store it on a networked platform. Of course, if you have two hosts and put a DAG guest on each and a load of disks you're getting that HA but you still don't get storage efficiency and lost flexibility as well as being constrained into buying hardware that can take lots of internal disk. And who in the enterprise is buying big iron servers for little silo jobs these days? If you have a couple of servers and that's it then yes DASDASDAS. If you need a dozen or more server names and isolated roles then a blade farm is going to be an attractive option to you. Again, more with the business requirements and strategic direction. Good luck with running Exchange and DAS in a Hyper-V blade host.

NetApp commissioned and released a document:
http://media.netapp.com/documents/esg-wp-netapp-exchange-storage-efficiency.pdf on, as the file name suggests, storage efficiency. It talks about what to look at when calculating the TCO of an Exchange environment and little of it has anything to do with the data inside the EDB files.

Remember what a showcase from Microsoft is. Remember what it is not. It is a "how we did". It is a "how we, with unlimited resources and an inability to use anything other than Microsoft software solved a business problem". It is not a reference architecture. It is not a prescriptive set of steps to follow to generate the perfect environment. If you or your staff have printed out a showcase then you are already in trouble and your business is ready to spend more than it likely needs to.

Bottom line? Think about it. Microsoft release a good application with their Exchange product but those people aren't paid to look beyond the application and you would do yourself a favour if you put anything they said to one side of your desk and got the other side of the story from your infrastructure architects.

Nice Sh*t-storm

The blog about 'misleading advice' http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/11/09/456851.aspx seems to have generated way more comments than I thought it would. As usual there are the kool-aid drunkards who leap to the defence of Microsoft on every little thing and who seem to have weaved in SAN=BAD, possibly because there is no understanding of the true arguments here.

VMware have responded in a candid and balanced manner: http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2010/11/virtualizing-exchange-on-vmware.html
As you can see, VMware HA is not VMotion or DRS but many people wrap all of the capabilities into one colloquial term; it's human nature.

I don't know who 'Alagba' is but he makes some pretty cutting remarks about the capabilities of the Hyper-V solution that Microsoft has; i.e. it can't really do VMotion like activities and that might be why it's not supported. Live Migration does in fact exist but it's less mature, significantly so.

Key points from the comments. Microsoft fanatical (can't argue). Microsoft schizophrenic (can't argue) Jim Lucey backpeddaling somewhat. Microsoft spiteful (jannie h) (might be true but well, it's a bit strong.

I'm learning quite a bit from these Exchanges as it helps me in my job counter all of the must-use-DAS that some Microsoft field staff still maintain.

One hopes that Jim's post can be safely buried and forgotten about since it's not credible.

Microsoft, DAG, VMotion, Crankiness, and stuff.

VMware recently released their best practice advice for Exchange 2010 and VSphere. The link is here: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Exchange_2010_on_VMware_-_Best_Practices_Guide.pdf It's all very sensible advice that links out to and uses Microsoft best practices all the way through it. Unfortunately someone at Microsoft had a problem with the documentation and the Product group have launched forth with a long old rant: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/11/09/456851.aspx that bears little resemblance to reality. Some of the comments have tried to get MS honest on it, others have just swigged another mouthful of Kool-Aid and supported everything that was written.

So folks, the VMware document is good. The Microsoft blog post is revealing but, as you can read on page 64 of the VMware document, is calling out misleading advice that isn't actually present as advice in the first place. Please read the VMware document carefully. Once you have properly read the document there is no way on earth that you will ever think you could VMotion a running DAG member. Really. Honestly.