Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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Host Resiliency & VM Agility
For mission-critical workloads, high availability and scalability are becoming increasingly important to
ensure that all users can access data and applications whenever they want. Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
provides enhanced capabilities that help to ensure that Exchange 2013 workloads are agile, easy to
manage, and highly available at the hypervisor level.
Host Clustering
This subsection discusses the key elements of host clustering, including failover clustering, Cluster Shared
Volumes, cluster networking, cluster-aware updating, virtual machine priority, virtual machine affinity, and
live migration.
Failover Clustering
Failover clustering allows you to connect physical machines (also called nodes) together to provide better
scalability and high availability. These clustered nodes work in such a way that if one or more of the active
nodes fail, the other nodes in the cluster begin to provide service (Figure 22). Clustered nodes are
continuously monitored to ensure that they are working properly. The nodes come to know each other’s
active status by using a heartbeat—a periodic signal between two directly connected machines.
Figure 22: Failover clustering—virtual machines fail over to Node 1 simultaneously