Bill PrayBlogger: Bill Pray
Recent research and work with my counterparts in our Data Center Strategies team has led me to a conclusion and recommendation that might seem aggressive to died-in-the-wool, tried-and-true, e-mail server administrators:
Enterprise production e-mail servers should be deployed virtualized by default (meaning that it should be an exception backed by specific technical considerations when they are deployed on “bare metal”).
Albeit, many organizations are already doing this – although most have relegated e-mail server virtualization to test environments.
The development of e-mail solutions, hardware technologies, and virtualization hypervisors has reached a point that enterprises can successfully virtualize production e-mail servers. E-mail applications are resource hungry and designed for bare metal server deployment. However, careful planning can overcome the pitfalls of deploying e-mail virtualized.
The benefits of virtualizing production e-mail servers are compelling. Lower costs, improved management, and better resiliency underscore the business case for virtualization.
I lay out more of the case for virtualizing production e-mail servers in a recently published research document E-Mail Servers and Virtualization (available to subscribers of the Burton Group content).
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Category: virtualization Tags: Bill Pray, Burton Group, e-mail, virtualization
