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Question
Monday, April 4, 2016 5:16 PM
Unable to find information about thin provisioning and Exchange 2013 or 2016. Is it supported? Thanks
All replies (10)
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 1:58 PM ✅Answered
Unable to find information about thin provisioning and Exchange 2013 or 2016. Is it supported? Thanks
Thin provisioning is not supported on an Exchange Server. This link is for Exchange 2016, but it's also applicable to Exchange 2013 as well.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj619301(v=exchg.160).aspx
Also, thin provisioning something with high i/o is never a good idea as you are going to see a degradation in performance since the OS has to ask the hypervisor to allocate a block of storage each time it has to write something. Plus any read that it has to do, could be anywhere in your disk subsystem. You will see much better read/write performance on a thick provisioned disk.
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Wednesday, April 6, 2016 5:45 PM ✅Answered
I couldn't find anything where microsoft explicitly says it supports thin provisioning for their exchange solution.
However, i did find where microsoft talks about using thin provisioning with Exchange. To me, I would take this as indirect evidence that microsoft does indeed, officialy, supports thin provisioning.
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 1:13 PM
This forum is for Exchange development questions. Please post questions about Exchange administration to the administration forum on TechNet.
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 1:26 PM
Hi,
thin provisioning is supported in exchange services, but its not recommended for the servers hosting the Mailboxes databases.
the deployment of the provisioning depends on the hardware resources of your environment, but from my experience i dont recommend to use thin provisioning for Mailboxes.
Regards
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 1:49 PM
I've only heard and read about virtualization the exchange from Exchange Team and never heard of thin provisioning it.
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Tuesday, April 5, 2016 5:52 PM
Thanks all for your input. I want to make sure my question is clear. Im asking this from the storage array perspective, so my question has to do with thin provisioning that occurs at the storage array level. Perhaps my question sounded like dynamic vs. fixed size VHDXs within Hyper-V. Maybe the answer is the same either way, however we'd like to see a support statement from Microsoft on this. Thin Provisioning at the storage level - supported or not. Performance can be compared with some Jetstress tests, but supported is the main question.
This could bring up a second question, thin provisioned at the storage level with fixed size vhd - would the storage array just fully allocate that size then, since the application is asking for say 100GB. 100GB would be allocated on the thin provisioned volume I assume, at the storage array.
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 6:32 PM
Also, thin provisioning something with high i/o is never a good idea as you are going to see a degradation in performance since the OS has to ask the hypervisor to allocate a block of storage each time it has to write something. Plus any read that it has to do, could be anywhere in your disk subsystem. You will see much better read/write performance on a thick provisioned disk.
This is not accurate. The OS has no idea that it's hard drives are thin provisioned. When the OS begins Disk I/O to an address on the hard drive that hasn't been provisioned by your storage solution, the storage solution will immediately make that space available.
Once the space is made available, it is never taken away regardless if data exists there or not. The only performance hit you would experience is when new space is being made available to the OS, (up to the hard drive size that was provisioned for the OS). The performance hit is extremely small, and would likely not be noticed by the end user. (we're talking micro-seconds folks) Short of using a tool to measure the performance, you'd never know you took a performance hit.
Our hard drives on our exhange servers are thin provisioned, and we've had no complaints, or problems.
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 7:11 PM
Also, thin provisioning something with high i/o is never a good idea as you are going to see a degradation in performance since the OS has to ask the hypervisor to allocate a block of storage each time it has to write something. Plus any read that it has to do, could be anywhere in your disk subsystem. You will see much better read/write performance on a thick provisioned disk.
This is not accurate. The OS has no idea that it's hard drives are thin provisioned. When the OS begins Disk I/O to an address on the hard drive that hasn't been provisioned by your storage solution, the storage solution will immediately make that space available.
Once the space is made available, it is never taken away regardless if data exists there or not. The only performance hit you would experience is when new space is being made available to the OS, (up to the hard drive size that was provisioned for the OS). The performance hit is extremely small, and would likely not be noticed by the end user. (we're talking micro-seconds folks) Short of using a tool to measure the performance, you'd never know you took a performance hit.
Our hard drives on our exhange servers are thin provisioned, and we've had no complaints, or problems.
There's still a delay there, the storage system still needs to allocate the storage to the VM.
Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 7:59 PM
Agreed, and as i said,
The only performance hit you would experience is when new space is being made available to the OS, (up to the hard drive size that was provisioned for the OS). The performance hit is extremely small, and would likely not be noticed by the end user. (we're talking micro-seconds folks) Short of using a tool to measure the performance, you'd never know you took a performance hit.
Wednesday, April 6, 2016 5:26 PM
So.. are thin provision disks (officially) supported by Microsoft for Exchange? Does anyone know? Its great to hear you are running them without any issues. Thanks