Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

The best practices below provide more guidance around planning and managing memory for virtual

machines running Exchange 2013 workloads.

Best Practices and Recommendations

For any virtual machine that is running Exchange 2013 roles, detailed and accurate capacity

planning and sizing should be performed to determine the correct amount of minimum memory

that should be assigned to the Exchange virtual machine. This value should be based on published

guidance from the Exchange team, as well as the use of the Exchange 2013 Server Role

Requirements Calculator. The following figures are the absolute smallest supported amounts of

memory required for an Exchange 2013 deployment:

 Mailbox: 8 GB minimum

 Client Access: 4 GB minimum

 Mailbox and Client Access combined: 8 GB minimum

The page file size minimum and maximum must be set to the operating system’s RAM plus 10 MB.

In environments where performance is critical, use SSD for Smart Paging.

Exchange 2013 Virtual Machine Storage Considerations

With an optimal configuration for both CPU and memory, you need to ensure that the underlying disk

subsystem is also optimally configured for the Exchange 2013 workload. This subsection discusses two key

storage considerations for Exchange 2013: virtual disks and guest storage.

Best Practices and Recommendations

Provide at least 30 GB of space on the drive where you will install Exchange.

Add an additional 500 MB of available disk space for each Unified Messaging (UM) language pack

that you plan to install.

Add 200 MB of available disk space on the system drive.

Use a hard disk with at least 500 MB of free space to store the message queue database, which can

be co-located on the system drive, assuming you have accurately planned for enough space and

I/O throughput.

Virtual Disks

When considering virtual disks, it is important to know the capabilities and limitations of the different

types. Discussed below are the VHDX file format, dynamically expanding VHDX versus fixed-size VHDX,

and virtual IDE versus virtual SCS.