Hardware requirement for running exchange 2010 on vmware workstation

Question

Dear Team,I need to create a exchange 2010 sp2 on a guest os on vmware workstation.kindly help me out with the physical hardware requirements for a home user

Answer 1

Hey Mukund26,
Before I answer your questions, my suggestion would be for you to figure out exactly what you want to get out of running that Exchange lab.  Are you trying to learn Exchange features like DAGs?  Are you trying to learn about virtualizing Exchange?  When you figure that out you'll be better able to answer question 1 since you may not need all of those virtual machines.
Here are my thoughts on your questions.
1) It is probably technically possible to run 10 virtual machines on the configuration you have but you're going to have pretty bad performance. I would try to trim that down to only the virutal machines that you really need in order to use the lab how you want to use it.  Here are some questions that may help you figure out what you need:
Why do you need two domain controllers?  I don't think you need to worry as much about redundancy in your lab. 
Why do you need 2 ESXi hosts and a vCenter?  What purpose do they serve in this configuration?  Are you trying to run the Exchange VMs nested under the ESXi VMs?  If so, why?
Is there a reason why you want to separate out HTS/CAS from MBX in your lab?   Combining all roles together can reduce the number of VMs you need.  If you separate out the roles you'll need to allocate a lot of RAM to support all of those Exchange VMs.
2)  Running a lot of virtual machines on a single 1TB SATA disk, especially a 5400 RPM disk, is going to be slow.  It'll be especially painful when the VMs are booting up, rebooting, shutting down, etc..  Try to stagger the power on operations so they don't all boot at once.  For example, first boot your DCs, then boot your HTS/CAS, then your MBX, etc.   There is no doubt that configuration will be slow, so if you can get your hands on an solid state drive with enough space you'll have significantly better performance.  For the purposes of a lab, though, it is probably ok if you can be patient.
3) I think the i5 processor will be just fine for this lab.  Usually in a lab setting CPU performance isn't the most important thing so similar to above as long as you can be a little patient I think that CPU will suit you just fine.
As I said figure out what you want to get out of the lab and then you can determine how many VMs you need and whether or not you want to upgrade hardware.  If you're looking to learn about Exchange 2010 in general I would suggest using multirole servers, getting rid of one of the DCs, and not worrying about virtualizing ESX/vCenter so that you can learn.  If you're looking to learn about virtualizing Exchange 2010 on vSphere then let's figure out exactly what you want to get out of it and figure out what you can learn using VMware Workstation and what you really need vSphere for.
Best of luck!
Matt
http://www.thelowercasew.com