Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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System Center 2012 SP1
System Center 2012 SP1 provides several components that give IT the ability to streamline infrastructure
management and—as discussed in this guide specifically—to better deploy, manage, maintain, and
protect Exchange 2013 in a virtualized environment.
Comprehensive Management Capabilities
Cloud computing is transforming the way organizations provide and consume IT services with the promise
of more productive infrastructure and more predictable applications. System Center 2012 SP1 delivers on
this promise by enabling your enterprise to benefit from private, hosted, and public cloud computing
while still supporting your unique business needs. It helps to organize your IT assets—network, storage,
and compute—into a hybrid cloud model spanning private cloud and public cloud services from a single
console view.
Infrastructure management: System Center 2012 SP1 provides a common management toolset to help
you configure, provision, monitor, and operate your IT infrastructure. If your infrastructure is like that of
most organizations, you have physical and virtual resources running heterogeneous operating systems.
The integrated physical, virtual, private, and public cloud management capabilities in System Center 2012
SP1 can help you ensure efficient IT management and optimized ROI of those resources.
Service delivery and automation: System Center 2012 SP1 helps you simplify and standardize your data
center with flexible service delivery and automation. Using the Service Manager and Orchestrator
components of System Center 2012 SP1, you can automate core organizational process workflows like
incident management, problem management, change management, and release management. You can
also integrate and extend your existing toolsets and build flexible workflows (or runbooks) to automate
processes across your IT assets and organizations.
Application management: System Center 2012 SP1 offers unique application management capabilities
that can help you deliver agile, predictable application services. Using the App Controller, Operations
Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager components of System Center 2012 SP1, you can provide
Applications as a Service—where a “service” is a deployed instance of a cloud-style application along with
its associated configuration and virtual infrastructure.
Virtual Machine Manager
System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is the control center of a virtualized Exchange
2013 deployment. This subsection takes a deeper dive into VMM by discussing the following topics:
centralized fabric configuration, virtual machine creation, virtual machine deployment, Dynamic
Optimization, virtual machine priority and affinity, availability sets, and private clouds.