• Supported
  • Hypervisors
    • HyperV
    • 3^rd Party Hypervisors
  • Host-based Clustering
    • All roles
  • Exchange Roles
    • All roles
  • Storage
    • Block level
      • iSCSI, FC, pass-through, etc.
    • Same requirements as Ex2010
      • Support for SMB3 file shares for specific limited scenario
        • Guest on 2012 with guest VHD’s on SMB3
        • CANNOT point guest to SMB3 share (will fail)
        • Still will not support running on NFS-based VMWare guest location
  • Migration
    • All Ex2013 roles
    • Never want to quick-migrate a machine on a DAG
      • Hyper-V specific
      • Live Migration/vMotion completely supported
  • Jetstress testing in guests
    • Yes, on supported Windows hypervisors or ESX 4.1 (or newer)
    • Used to be an issue due to perf counters not being accurate
• Not Supported
  • Dynamic memory & Memory Overcommit
    • Not supported for any 2013 role
  • Hypervisor Snapshots
    • Not Supported for any 2013 role
  • Differencing/Delta Disks
    • Not Supported for any 2013 role
  • Apps on the root
    • Only deploy management, monitoring, AV, etc.
  • Significant processor oversubscription
    • Limited to 2:1, best practice is 1:1
      • Start hitting at CPU contraints
        • Delivery throughput reduction = queue growth
        • Content indexing throughput reduction = increased IOPS
        • Store ROP processing throughput reduction = RPC latency & end-user pain
• Proper Exchange sizing ensures that resources are available on-demand, so don’t allow hypervisors to yank those resources away.
• Server 2012
  • Many deployment-blocking limits removed
  • Customers who virtualize 2013 will have a great experience on Server 2012 HyperV
  • Important to be aware of what does and doesn’t work (and supportability limits)
• Multirole vs. Single Role on Virtual
  • Deploy it the same way as you would the physicals
• Hyper-V Gotchas
  • 10% Overhead for Hyper-V Only

There was a tweet that gave a synopsis of a previous duplicate of the session: “Don’t virtualize Exchange.”  This is the wrong answer.  Virtualize, but do so correctly.  Don’t half-ass it, and you’ll pull it off splendidly.