Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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Single Exchange 2013 Virtual Machine on a Hyper-V Cluster
For smaller organizations that require only a single Exchange 2013 server but still need a high level of
availability, a good option is to run the Exchange 2013 server as a virtual machine on top of a Hyper-V
physical cluster. Figure 33 shows two Hyper-V cluster nodes connected, in this case, to some centralized
SAN storage. Note that this storage could be iSCSI or FC, or with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, it could
also be SMB 3.0-based storage.
The Exchange 2013 virtual machine has a number of virtual disks to store data and other relevant
Exchange information—which is further stored on different LUNs and spindles in the underlying disk
subsystem. If one of the physical cluster nodes fails, any virtual machines currently running on that now-
failed node will experience some downtime.
Figure 33: Virtual machine guests failing over from one node to another (active node failing)
The virtual machines, however, will restart automatically on another node in that cluster—without
administrator intervention and with minimal downtime (Figure 34). Remember one key consideration,
though: If there are multiple virtual machines on Node 1, they all now have experienced downtime.
Figure 34: Virtual machine guests failing over from one node to another
The cluster wants to start these virtual machines again on another available cluster node as quickly as
possible, but you may want to ensure that the Exchange 2013 virtual machine starts first. With this in
mind, you can set the Failover Priority setting for the Exchange 2013 virtual machine to high. This