Email message volume and mailbox sizes are experiencing explosive growth due to increased reliance on email for communication and collaboration services. To keep pace with the changing email user profile characteristics Microsoft® has also been continuously evolving the Exchange® architecture. The latest in server, storage and network technology can offer many enhanced capabilities and benefits for implementing Microsoft® Exchange 2007 in enterprises of all sizes. For example, Internet SCSI (iSCSI) technology combined with server virtualization software using hypervisor-based virtual machines (VMs) can significantly reduce total cost for implementing the Exchange Server, and connecting, managing and protecting the Exchange data. As a result, when you implement Exchange® 2007 your messaging IT infrastructure architecture is likely to be considerably different than it was when you implemented a previous version of Exchange®.

This paper describes the Dell Reference Architecture, a blueprint or a starting configuration, for designing Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 storage in a virtualized server environment using Dell™ EqualLogic™ arrays.