Recently I was in need of creating a 2-node Exchange 2003 cluster in VMWare Workstation 6. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any single procedure for doing so. Left me to figure it out on my own which I did. Wanted to share it here in case anyone would like to see how to do this.
First I needed to just create the virtualized hardware setup in VMWare. Here is a good link that provides you the steps for setting up the virtual nodes in VMWare Workstation 5. Fortunately this procedure also works in 6. The only comment I"ll make is that you may want to go ahead before installing Exchange and get another shared virtual drive for the DTC virtual server created at this point in addition to the Q: drive (Quorum) as it is best practice to put the DTC VS on a separate drive. Also if you are going to create multiple storage groups you probably should create additional shared virtual drives for each SG (remembering to keep the transaction logs for each SG on separate drives)
After doing this I was ready to get the Exchange cluster installed and configured. Microsoft does provide a good deployment guide for doing just this.
One last note. You may need to remove the physical drive resources from the default cluster group and then adding them to a new Exchange virtual server cluster group before you can start up the SA service.
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Posted by: FeleciaMorrison | July 11, 2011 at 12:08 AM