Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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 Self-service: Administrators can delegate management and use of the private cloud while
retaining the opaque usage model. Self-service users do not need to ask the private cloud
provider for administrative changes beyond increasing capacity and quotas.
 Elasticity: Administrators can add resources to a private cloud to increase capacity.
 Optimization: Use of underlying resources is continually optimized without affecting the overall
private cloud user experience.
Best Practices and Recommendations
From an Exchange 2013 perspective, an IT administrator can define a cloud to be used exclusively
with Exchange 2013 virtual machines. The IT organization would define the capacity of the cloud,
which can use elements such as storage classifications to ensure that all virtual machines placed in
the Exchange cloud use a certain tier of storage. In addition, specific virtual machine templates and
service templates can be assigned to the Exchange 2013 cloud, helping to ensure that the only
virtual machines deployed into this cloud are those that have been sized a certain way and will host
Exchange 2013 once deployed. The templates also can contain the appropriate unattend scripts to
install Exchange 2013 virtual machines.
During the creation process, you select the underlying fabric resources to be available in the private cloud,
configure library paths for users, and set the capacity for the private cloud. Therefore, before you create a
private cloud, you should configure the fabric resources, such as storage, networking, library servers and
shares, host groups, and hosts.
Once the Exchange private cloud is created, an IT administrator can delegate access to certain users and
groups within the IT infrastructure, such as the Exchange administrators (Figure 46). The IT administrator
can determine—through rich, granular role-based controls—who can see what inside the cloud, and who
can perform which tasks associated with it.
Figure 46: System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager – User Roles