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People often wonder about server storage options. What are the differences between different storage types? What solution is best for a particular situation? You have to sort through a lot of acronyms with server storage: U320 SCSI, SATA, SAS, NAS, iSCSI, SAN . . . the list goes on and on. I’ll demystify server storage options and help you determine which solution is best for different situations.
In this book, we’ve pulled together four articles from SQL Server Magazine to give you an overview of Exchange Server storage options. People often wonder about server storage options. What are the differences between different storage types? What solution is best for a particular situation? You have to sort through a lot of acronyms with server storage: U320 SCSI, SATA, SAS, NAS, iSCSI, SAN . . . the list goes on and on. In this chapter, I'll demystify server storage options and help you determine which solution is best for different situations.
Chapter 2, looks at the primary advantages of SANs: flexibility, performance capabilities, and support for high availability and business continuance. The chapter considers each of these advantages separately.
Chapter 3, looks at how you can make the most out of your SAN with iSCSI. Microsoft offers new iSCSI-enabling software, making it possible to cost effectively bring Windows servers into the data center. This chapter looks at the steps required to make this happen and factors you need to consider.
Chapter 4 looks at virtualization. The topic of hardware virtualization has generated much interest in the Windows community. Hardware platforms have become more accommodating of the demands of software that’s running in a virtual server, and virtualization software has become more mature and functional. However, you shouldn’t simply run out and install Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 on a virtualization platform such as Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 (R2) or VMware Server. There are performance considerations, support limitations, and deployment issues that you have to take into account before you can virtualize any part of Exchange 2003 within a production messaging environment. In this chapter, we’ll explore some of the benefits of virtualization, Microsoft’s support limitations, virtual machine (VM) performance considerations, and deployment issues that you need to think about before you virtualize any part of Exchange 2003 in a production environment.