Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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Storage Considerations
Storage configuration is one of the critical design considerations for any Mailbox Server role in Exchange
2013. With a growing number of physical storage devices resulting in increased power use, organizations
want to reduce energy consumption and hardware maintenance costs through virtualization. Running
Exchange 2013 on hardware that is either underutilized or oversubscribed increases overall operational
costs, including the cost of providing power, cooling, and storage infrastructure, as well as the
administrative overhead of maintaining storage capacity on this hardware.
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V has a number of different storage options for storing the virtual disks and
related data associated with a virtualized Exchange 2013 infrastructure, providing the administrator with
flexibility to choose based on desired levels of performance, resiliency, and budget.
Storage Options for Hyper-V Virtual Machines
Storage virtualization helps administrators perform backup, archiving, and recovery tasks by reducing the
complexity of storage devices and the time required to manage them. Windows Server 2012 introduces a
class of sophisticated storage virtualization enhancements that can be easily implemented to develop
resilient infrastructure. These enhancements use two new concepts: Storage Spaces and Storage Pools.
Storage Spaces
With the Storage Spaces technology, you can achieve a desired level of resiliency through automatic or
controlled allocation of heterogeneous storage media presented as one logical entity. Storage Spaces
shields the physical disks and presents selected storage capacity as pools, known as storage pools, in
which a virtual disk, known as a storage space, can be created. Storage Spaces supports two optional
resiliency modes: mirror and parity. These provide per-pool support for disks that are reserved for
replacing failed disks (hot spares), background scrubbing, and intelligent error correction. In case of a
power failure or cluster failover, the integrity of data is preserved so that recovery happens quickly and
does not result in data loss.
The Storage Spaces technology is fully integrated with failover clustering to enable continuously available
service deployments. One or more storage pools can be clustered across multiple nodes within a single
cluster. Storage Spaces supports thin provisioning to allow organizations to easily share storage capacity
among multiple unrelated data sets, thereby maximizing capacity use. Fully scriptable management is
enabled through the Windows Storage Management API, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI),
and Windows PowerShell. Storage Spaces also can be managed through the File and Storage Services role
in Server Manager. Finally, Storage Spaces provides notifications when the amount of available capacity in
a storage pool hits a configurable threshold.
Storage Pools
Storage pools are a collection of disks used for storing replicas, shadow copies, and transfer logs and are
the fundamental building blocks for Storage Spaces (Figure 6). In Windows Server 2012, storage pools are
a collection of physical disks grouped together into one or more containers. This allows for storage
aggregation, flexible capacity expansion, and delegated administration of storage. Windows Server 2012
maps a storage pool by combining a group of hard disks and/or solid-state drives (SSDs). By simply
adding additional drives, storage pools are dynamically expanded to handle the growing size of data.