Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013
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Conclusion
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V is a great fit for virtualizing Exchange 2013 workloads. As demand for
virtualization technology grows, Microsoft has continued to make it easier for organizations to choose to
virtualize workloads that were not previously considered good candidates. Virtualization of Exchange 2013
is a valid option for organizations looking to address the impact of any wasted resources from Exchange
deployments on underutilized hardware. In addition, Exchange virtualization delivers other significant
benefits, including increased dual-levels of resiliency, along with significant overall power and space
savings, improved server utilization, rapid server provisioning, and increased performance and
manageability. With Hyper-V technology, Microsoft provides a platform with flexible and robust
virtualization capabilities. Whether in your data center, with a service provider, or in a private cloud,
Microsoft provides flexibility and control to consume IT as a service—in whatever way best meets your
unique business needs.
Proper planning is required before virtualizing business-critical workloads like Exchange 2013, and it is
beneficial to understand the best practices and recommendations discussed in this guide. At a high level,
the fabric considerations can help you to effectively plan the physical infrastructure, including processors,
memory, storage, and network. Likewise, the agility and resiliency considerations can help you to
configure virtual machines using Exchange 2013 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V settings, depending
on various requirements.
Both Exchange 2013 roles (Client Access Server and Mailbox Server) are supported for virtualization.
Combining Exchange Mailbox servers that are part of a DAG with host-based failover clustering and
migration technology is also now supported. As a best practice, spend adequate time designing the
virtualized environment to avoid consequences later. For organizations that have high availability or site
resiliency needs, it is important to determine these requirements as a first step. For high availability, you
must deploy the same Exchange roles (for example, Client Access Server) across multiple physical Hyper-V
hosts to allow for load balancing and high availability. Therefore, never deploy either of the following on
the same Hyper-V host: Mailbox servers that are members of the same DAGs or all Client Access servers.
To optimize high availability and resiliency, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V even lets you prioritize virtual
machines in a failover situation.
The Virtual Machine Configuration section provides a guide to design detailed architecture and system
specifications for building virtual machines for Exchange workloads. Remember that it is also necessary to
plan for needed resources for the virtual machines, including CPU, memory, storage, and network.
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V offers increased virtual machine resource densities of up to 64 virtual
processors and 1 TB of RAM per virtual machine; this is a significant boost to virtualizing mission-critical,
heavy-duty workloads like Exchange Mailbox Server roles and multi-role servers.
Virtualizing Exchange 2013 with Windows Server 2012 gives organizations flexible deployment options,
both on-premises and in the cloud. System Center 2012 SP1 enables these organizations to deploy,
manage, maintain, and protect Exchange 2013 in a virtualized environment. System Center 2012 SP1
Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager provide a highly capable set of tools to manage and
deploy virtual machines to host the key Exchange 2013 components. Likewise, System Center 2012 SP1
Data Protection Manager provides continuous data protection and rapid data recovery for Exchange
Server using replication, synchronization, and recovery point creation.