Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

If the Exchange virtual machine is configured to use SR-IOV, but the guest operating system does not

support it, SR-IOV VFs are not allocated to the virtual machine. We recommend that you disable SR-IOV

on all virtual machines that run guest operating systems that do not support SR-IOV.

Best Practices and Recommendations

SR-IOV can provide the highest levels of networking performance for virtualized Exchange

virtual machines. Check with your hardware vendor for support because there may be a BIOS and

firmware update required to enable SR-IOV.

QoS Bandwidth Management

Quality of Service is a prioritization technique that gives the ability to cost effectively manage network

traffic and enhance user experiences in enterprise environments. QoS allows you to meet the service

requirements of a workload or application in an Exchange environment by measuring network bandwidth,

detecting changing network conditions (such as congestion or availability of bandwidth), and prioritizing

or throttling network traffic. QoS provides features like bandwidth management, classification and

tagging, priority-based flow control, policy-based QoS, and Hyper-V QoS.

For Hyper-V virtual machines specifically, QoS bandwidth management helps to set a throttling rate for a

workload like Exchange 2013. Minimum Bandwidth and Maximum Bandwidth enable organizations to

enforce predictable network throughput for the Exchange workload. Apart from bandwidth management,

organizations can prioritize and tag traffic so that QoS is enforced from end-to-end across a data center.

Other Key Exchange 2013 Virtual Machine Considerations

In Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V Integration Services include six components that provide performance

enhancements to a child partition (that is, virtual machine or guest) and additional interoperability

between child and parent partitions. Integrations Services are available in a child partition only after they

are installed in a supported guest operating system. It is also possible to update Integration Services after

the initial installation, and this is usually recommended when migrating a virtual machine from an older to

a newer version of Hyper-V (for example, Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012) or as new

versions of the Integrations Services are released.

Best Practices and Recommendations

Running a guest operating system of Windows Server 2012 on a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

host does not require an update of the Integration Services—they automatically have the latest,

most optimized versions.

Integration Services are installed as user mode components in the guest operating system and are

implemented in the following services:

 Hyper-V Heartbeat Service (vmicheartbeat)

 Hyper-V Guest Shutdown Service (vmicshutdown)

 Hyper-V Data Exchange Service (vmickvpexchange)

 Hyper-V Time Synchronization Service (vmictimesync)