At Teched 2011 this year, Microsoft announced the broadened virtualization support of Exchange 2010.

With Exchange 2010 SP1 (or later) deployed:

• All Exchange 2010 server roles, including Unified Messaging, are supported in a virtual machine.
• Unified Messaging virtual machines have the following special requirements: 1) Four virtual processors are required for the virtual machine. Memory should be sized using standard best practices guidance. 2) Four physical processor cores are available for use at all times by each Unified Messaging role virtual machine. This requirement means that no processor oversubscription can be in use. This requirement affects the ability of the Unified Messaging role virtual machine to utilize physical processor resources.
• Exchange server virtual machines (including Exchange Mailbox virtual machines that are part of a DAG) may be combined with host-based failover clustering and migration technology, as long as the virtual machines are configured such that they will not save and restore state on disk when moved, or taken offline. All failover activity must result in a cold boot when the virtual machine is activated on the target node. All planned migration must either result in shutdown and cold boot, or an online migration that makes use of a technology like Hyper-V Live Migration. Hypervisor migration of virtual machines is supported by the hypervisor vendor; therefore, you must ensure that your hypervisor vendor has tested and supports migration of Exchange virtual machines. Microsoft supports Hyper-V Live Migration of these virtual machines.

For more information, please contact us at info@rutter-net.com

Learn more about Rutter's  Virtualization & Storage and Directory/Messaging solutions and services.

For guidelines on virtualizing Exchange on Vsphere, please refer to:
Exchange 2010 on VMware