Note: This article is based on Hyper-V 2.0, and might not apply to Hyper-V 3.0 (Server 2012) Forefront Security for Exchange Server (FSE) supports the Hyper-V platform. FSE is approved for any hypervisor-based virtualization technology certified under the Microsoft Server Virtualization program.
Before you install FSE, check that your system exceeds the minimum system memory and disk space requirements for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. You need more than the minimum amount of memory and disk space for Exchange because too little available memory or disk space may impact the ability of Forefront to scan large files.
If both the Exchange and SharePoint products are installed on the same server, only Forefront Security for Exchange can be installed to protect Exchange. You can't install Forefront Security for SharePoint on that same server to protect SharePoint.
Minimum workstation requirements
After you have verified that your computer meets the requirements for running Exchange Server in a Hyper-V environment, check that your host computer meets the following guidelines:
The file-level antivirus scan can also cause a conflict when FSE tries to scan e-mail messages.
The following are guidelines for the virtual machine on which FSE will be installed:
You may encounter network bottlenecks if you are running more than one virtual machine and the host computer only has a single network card. You should add a second network card and create an additional Virtual Network adapter. Network bottlenecks may also occur if you are running more than one virtual machine and the host computer only has a single hard drive. Ideally, each VHD should be on its own hard drive to prevent slowdowns due to multiple VMs accessing the same physical hard drive.
Adding FSE increases the resources utilized by your Exchange environment. To ensure that your virtual environment can handle the anticipated load from Exchange and FSE, it is recommended that you measure the performance counters before and after installing FSE.
Based on the differences in the performance data from before and after the FSE installation, you may want to adjust your virtual hardware requirements. This can include allocating more memory, CPU affinity, and improved disk I/O. Memory and CPU utilization are usually the most heavily impacted by FSE.
Because guest and host operating system settings such as video, sound cards, floppy disk drives, and virtual hardware require resources, it is recommended that you configure all nonessential items for "best performance." If you are not using it, you may also want to consider disabling or removing any nonessential item. This helps optimize performance in general of both the guest and host computers.
Be cautious when adjusting the number of processes you want running per server for the FSE scan jobs (transport or realtime scan jobs only), as this can quickly deplete memory resources in your virtual machine. For example, transport scanning is set by default to 4 process counts. If all 4 are in use, then the number of selected scan engines is multiplied by the number of transport processes in use plus the size of the files being scanned. The utilization of the process counts might multiply if Hyper V is not configure properly.
For example, if you are using the default transport process count of 4, the maximum of 5 scan engines for the transport scan job, and each engine is using 100 megabytes (MB) of memory, then you can estimate the overall memory utilization by using the following computation:
4 (transport processes) x 5 (scan engines) x 100 (MB) + file sizes of scanned attachments = memory utilization
Memory is quickly exhausted if you increase the transport or realtime process counts, add more scan engines, and increase the bias. In most cases, the default number of process counts is adequate; however, you should consult Transport Scan Job and Realtime Scan Job for more information on fine tuning these settings. Additionally, use the performance data you collected earlier to help gauge how many process counts you should be using.
Danny van Dam edited Revision 20. Comment: added note about that this might not apply to Hyper-V 3.0
Danny van Dam edited Revision 19. Comment: added hyper-v version to title
Carsten Siemens edited Revision 18. Comment: Fixed misspelling and added tag: has comment
Richard Mueller edited Revision 17. Comment: Removed (en-US) from title
Guowen Su edited Revision 14. Comment: process counts
Jewel Lambert edited Revision 12. Comment: corrected spelling typo
Horizon_Net edited Revision 11. Comment: Added toc.
Ed Price MSFT edited Revision 9. Comment: Updated title casing.
Tony Soper_MSFT edited Revision 7. Comment: light edit for Hypr-V terminology, and added Exchange disk space link
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