Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

Figure 41: System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager – Intelligent Placement

Intelligent Placement in VMM inputs host system data, workload performance history, and administrator-

defined business requirements into sophisticated algorithms. This provides easy-to-understand, ranked

results that can take the guesswork out of the placement task and help to ensure that workloads are

spread across physical resources for optimal performance.

This placement also takes into account situations where a virtual machine requires specific hardware

offload capabilities, such as SR-IOV, as defined in the template. If these capabilities are not available on a

particular host, that host will not receive a star ranking as part of the Intelligent Placement destinations.

Storage Classification

VMM also provides the ability for an administrator to apply simple classifications to storage, which can be

used for storing and running Exchange Server virtual machines. Storage can be classified in any way that

the administrator wants, but common examples include terms such as “Bronze,” “Silver,” and “Gold,” which

may represent I/O characteristics, capacity, performance, and redundancy of the underlying storage array.

For example, consider the storage options and requirements for the Mailbox Server role in Exchange 2013:

Bronze might be low-capacity solid-state drives in an older SAN; Silver might be SAS drives in a newer

array; and Gold might be high-capacity SATA drives. These storage classifications can be used in an

Exchange 2013 virtual machine template so that VMM automatically ensures that a chosen type of

storage will be used for a particular deployment.