Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

controllers running on the same Hyper-V host can be migrated to different nodes to prevent loss of the

domain in case of failure.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V provides a cluster group property called AntiAffinityClassNames that can

be applied to any virtual machine in the Hyper-V cluster group. This property allows preferences to be set

to keep a virtual machine off the same node as other virtual machines of a similar kind.

Best Practices and Recommendations

Use Virtual Machine Anti-Affinity rules to keep related Exchange 2013 virtual machines apart on

hosts within a Hyper-V Cluster. This ensures that if any host is lost, whole Exchange deployments

are not taken down as a result.

Live Migration

Previous sections of this paper have focused on the failover cluster, which provides the solid, resilient

foundation for ensuring workloads like virtual machines are as continuously available as possible. Further,

with a failover cluster in place, other key capabilities that provide solutions for planned maintenance are

unlocked. Live migration is one of these capabilities.

Live migration is a process where running workloads can be moved from a source server to a destination

server without impacting the availability of running business applications or critical data. While migrating

live virtual machines, there are two major concerns: outage of applications or data, and prevention of data

loss.

Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V provides a better way to migrate running virtual machines from one

physical server to another without hampering business availability. Hyper-V 2012 with the enhanced Live

Migration feature allows you to execute the live migration of multiple workloads at the same time, all

without downtime. During the migration process of any workload, no additional configuration changes

are required on the guest operating system.

 Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V efficiently uses the available network bandwidth on

designated Live Migration networks to reduce the time taken for the process.

 Hyper-V now offers functionality to migrate multiple virtualized Exchange 2013 servers

simultaneously.

For migrating virtual machines, Hyper-V sets up a TCP connection between source and destination hosts

to transfer virtual machine configurations. The memory assigned to the migrating virtual machine is

transferred over the network to the destination virtual machine. Hyper-V keeps track of the memory

pages being modified during the transfer from the source to the destination server. Once all the modified

pages are copied completely to the destination server, Hyper-V takes care of the migration of any

associated virtual hard disk files or connectivity to physical storage attached through a virtual FC adapter.

After completing all stages of migration, Hyper-V brings up the new destination virtual machine, with no

downtime to the workload itself (Figure 26).