Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

 Deploy as much bandwidth as possible for the Live Migration network to ensure that the

live migration completes as quickly as possible.

In the prior example, placing Mailbox Server 1 on a separate host from Mailbox Server 2 was ideal

because it ensured that if a host were lost, the entire DAG would not be lost as well. To help enforce this

kind of configuration, you can use some of the features within the Hyper-V cluster, such as Preferred and

Possible Owners. Importantly, to ensure that certain virtual machines stay apart on different hosts, you

also can use the AntiAffinityClassNames property of the failover cluster.

Best Practices and Recommendations

In this example, the administrator can create two Anti-Affinity Groups:

$CASAntiAffinity = New-Object System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection

$CASAntiAffinity.Add("CAS Array")

$DAGAntiAffinity = New-Object System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection

$DAGAntiAffinity.Add("DAG")

With the affinity class names defined, the administrator can assign them to the cluster groups.

Once again, the Get-ClusterGroup cmdlet can be used to update the value of this property for each

virtual machine:

(Get-ClusterGroup -Name EXCH-CAS1).AntiAffinityClassNames = $CASAntiAffinity

(Get-ClusterGroup -Name EXCH-CAS2).AntiAffinityClassNames = $CASAntiAffinity

(Get-ClusterGroup -Name EXCH-DAG1).AntiAffinityClassNames = $DAGAntiAffinity

(Get-ClusterGroup -Name EXCH-DAG2).AntiAffinityClassNames = $DAGAntiAffinity

In addition, customers can take advantage of the Failover Priority setting to help control the start

order of virtual machines upon failover.

These settings and configuration options can help to ensure that as you scale out an Exchange 2013

infrastructure on Hyper-V hosts, you are ensuring the highest levels of both performance and resiliency by

combining Exchange and Hyper-V high availability solutions.