Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

Why Microsoft Virtualization

and Management?

Organizations today want the ability to consistently and coherently develop, deploy, and manage their

services and applications across on-premises and cloud environments. Microsoft offers a consistent and

integrated platform that spans from on-premises to cloud environments. This platform is based on key

Microsoft technologies, including Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 SP1.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V is an optimal virtualization platform that can be used for deploying

demanding and intensive production applications, including Exchange 2013. With Hyper-V, Microsoft has

become one of the leading vendors in virtualization technology.

This virtualization platform, based on

new technologies from Microsoft, offers many features and improvements, including improved scale and

performance, a hypervisor in the box, and enterprise features at no additional cost.

Together, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Exchange 2013 deliver improved availability, flexibility,

scalability, and manageability. A virtualized Exchange environment offers low input/output (I/O) response

times with excellent performance scalability. Deploying a virtualized Exchange 2013 environment is a

quick and streamlined process, with helpful scripts and easy-to-follow wizards. In addition, the web-based

Exchange Admin Center console simplifies the management of a consolidated Exchange 2013

environment, automates some important tasks, and provides a user-friendly interface.

By combining Windows Server 2012 with System Center 2012 SP1, organizations can comprehensively

manage demanding applications, such as Exchange 2013, as well as the infrastructure—including physical

and virtual resources—in an integrated and unified manner.

The key benefits of this integrated

virtualization and management platform by Microsoft include the following:

 Better scalability: Higher capacity virtual machines that support up to 64 virtual CPUs (vCPUs)

and 1 TB of memory per virtual machine, and greater virtual machine density (up to 1,024 per

host and 8,000 per cluster).

 Better performance: Hyper-V support for Host and Guest Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA),

Virtual Fibre Channel (FC), Hardware Offloading, Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), and

more.

 Better availability: Faster and simultaneous live migrations, storage migrations, and shared-

nothing live migrations, along with dynamic quorum for more resilient failover clusters.

 Better manageability: Comprehensive management tools in System Center 2012 SP1 for

Exchange 2013 virtual machines.