Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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Centralized Fabric Configuration
System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) enables the IT administrator to quickly and
easily configure and manage virtualization hosts, networking, and storage resources in order to create and
deploy virtual machines to host key Exchange 2013 components (Figure 38).
Figure 38: System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager - Overview
In addition to managing Hyper-V, VMM also provides management for Citrix XenServer and VMware
ESX/i hosts and host clusters on which virtual machines and services can be deployed. To help organize
hosts and the deployment of virtual machines, the IT administrator can create host groups based on
considerations such as physical site location or resource allocation.
In terms of networking, VMM manages resources such as logical networks, IP address pools, and load
balancers that are used to deploy virtual machines and services. VMM also manages storage resources
like storage classifications, LUNs, and storage pools that are made available to Hyper-V hosts and host
clusters.
Virtual Machine Creation
The VMM management console provides a number of capabilities and features that can be used to
accelerate and optimize the deployment of virtual machines to be used for Exchange 2013.
Physical-to-Virtual Conversions
VMM offers an inbox physical-to-virtual (P2V) capability to quickly and efficiently convert physical
Exchange Servers to virtual Exchange Servers that run on Hyper-V. VMM offers two methods for
conversion of physical machines: online and offline.
With an online conversion, the source computer continues to perform normal operations during the
conversion, and it is available throughout the process. VMM creates a copy of local NTFS volumes and