EA3389

United States Navy Marine Corps virtualizes 700,000+ Microsoft Exchange users to Achieve Mission Critical Reliability

Several factors brought HP/EDS to virtualizing the NMCI Exchange infrastructure. The primary goal was to increase overall reliability for the Exchange infrastructure, which was deemed a mission critical application for NMCI. VMware was chosen as a platform to increase agility in their Exchange deployment, minimize outages, allow remote administration, decrease server build and restore times and provide hardware independence for the Exchange servers. Unlike many other VMware deployments, consolidation ratios in this scenario were a secondary goal.
The challenges faced were scaling a VI3 environment to an enterprise with 25+ data centers and 750,000 mailboxes. Once complete the NMCI deployment would be the largest VMware based Exchange deployment in the world. The Navy and EDS have strict SLA guidelines that must be met and could not change due to the virtualization of the mailbox servers. Another challenge was deployment over several SAN infrastructures. The deployment and management needed to be seamless to the operational teams and end users.
With all these factors and challenges HP/EDS has successfully deployed the solution to over 350K of the 750K user base thus far and is on target to complete the deployment on schedule. The agility of a virtual environment has given NMCI new levels of reliability and security that was not available prior to deployment.

Enterprise Applications

Breakout Session

United States Navy Marine Corps, Microsoft Exchange, Mission Critical

1 Hour

Michael Fisher, TAM, VMware, Inc.
Shawne Samuelson, NMCI Virtualization Lead Engineer, EDS
Robert Pearson, Vice President, Navy and Marine Corps Operations, EDS, an HP Company