VMware, Inc, the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that its industry-leading virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3, continues to enhance its status as one of the premier platforms for running Microsoft Exchange, with the Interfaith Medical Center of New York City, medical device manufacturer NuVasive, Ohio Mutual Insurance Group, the University of Plymouth in the U.K., Marvell Technology Group Ltd., and the Rochester General Hospital system joining an ever-growing list of organizations that have turned to VMware to optimize their Exchange environments.

Exchange customers are migrating to the VMware platform as virtualization becomes a core component of mainstream IT environments, and IT organizations seek to deliver their applications as dynamic services, while cutting costs. Microsoft Exchange is a commonly virtualized application and is supported by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). VMware ESX was the first hypervisor to be certified under the program, providing VMware customers with access to support services directly from Microsoft.

“We are going to be implementing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007,” said Joseph Sorrenti, assistant vice president for infrastructure at Interfaith Medical Center. “VMware did an excellent job in getting its platform certified with Microsoft. Interfaith has implemented a virtualization-first policy, and we’re confident that VMware is the best infrastructure on which to run our most crucial applications.”

50,000 Mailboxes at U.K. University

One example of a large Microsoft Exchange deployment on VMware is at the University of Plymouth in the U.K. The university has virtualized 50,000 Exchange 2007 mailboxes on VMware Infrastructure, giving the university a more manageable and flexible Exchange environment, while taking advantage of VMware’s unique high-availability tools, such as VMware HA and VMotion technologies.

“We couldn’t be happier with the uptime and performance of our Exchange implementation on the VMware platform,” said Adrian Jane, infrastructure and operations manager at the University of Plymouth. “The VMware platform is ideal for mission-critical applications like Exchange Server 2007. VMware Infrastructure is a proven and highly stable product. And when your mission-critical applications are running on VMware solutions, they may help fully protect them. You may also have rapid recovery if any issues arise. So for us, it was the only choice for our virtualized environment.”

Based on their overall IT infrastructure, the university estimates it is saving roughly $90,000 annually on utility costs and reducing CO2 emissions by 170 tons per year by using the VMware platform. The number of server racks needed has also been reduced from 32 to two.

VMware Choice Backed by Successful Exchange Deployment on VMware

After considering other competitor products, Marvell Technology Group Ltd. selected the VMware platform as the foundation for its virtual infrastructure, based on 1) VMware’s proven track record of success in production datacenters, and 2) its ability to meet all existing virtualization requirements. As an example of their trust of VMware solutions, Marvell deployed a brand new Exchange 2007 infrastructure on the VMware infrastructure, equipped with VMware tools like VMware HA and VMware DRS. Marvell is currently in the process of migrating all 6,000 mailboxes to this new infrastructure.

“Microsoft Exchange is a critical application for us,” said Rick Chang, associate vice president of IT Infrastructure at Marvell Semiconductor. “Service availability is essential to our business operation. VMware provides robust feature sets with built-in automation, high-availability and manageability. The decision is easy for us, we picked a solution that can give us high-availability of the virtualized environment and the ability to recover quickly should something happen.”

Exchange Virtualization for Healthcare

Another large Exchange deployment on the VMware platform is at Rochester General Hospital, which has a distributed environment in upstate New York. Rochester’s IT organization recently virtualized its 5,000-mailbox Exchange environment to improve control, manageability and uptime.

“We virtualized all our Exchange servers in our VMware environment and had no issues whatsoever,” said Tom Gibaud, manager of information technology at Rochester General Hospital. “Simply put, VMware Infrastructure 3 helps us better manage our computing environment. For example, if we notice that there is a memory error on a server, it is very easy for us to utilize the VMotion functionality to move that box somewhere else, replace the memory chip, and then VMotion it back. Try doing that with a datacenter full of physical servers!”

Saving Money, Speeding Deployment, Ensuring Availability

NuVasive recently upgraded from Exchange 2003 running on a conventional physical infrastructure to Exchange 2007 running on the VMware platform. The upgrade involved about 500 mailboxes on four Intel-based blade servers. The entire upgrade to Exchange 2007 and the migration to a virtualized environment were completed in a month.

Exchange is one of several critical applications that NuVasive has virtualized on the VMware platform, which has already saved the company about $1.1 million dollars in capital and operational costs including hardware, cabling, rack space, power and administration. In NuVasive’s case, provisioning time has been cut from days and sometimes weeks for physical boxes to 20 minutes for a virtual machine. Application uptime is 99.99 percent.

Archiving Email in a Virtualized Environment

The Ohio Mutual Insurance Group (OMIG) is another VMware customer that is running its entire Exchange environment on the VMware platform, which includes approximately 200 mailboxes. OMIG uses Exchange in conjunction with a third party application, Symantec Enterprise Vault, which provides email archiving.

“We were pleasantly surprised how the VMware platform handled distributed resources and provides high availability,” said Mark Coe, manager of IT infrastructure and Operations at OMIG. “Those are very important capabilities for the virtualization of email systems and all enterprise applications. We now rely on VMware virtualization for the vast majority of our day-to-day operations.”