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47 BP1036 | Microsoft Exchange 2010 on a Hyper-V Virtual Infrastructure Supported by Dell EqualLogic SANs
Hyper-V and VMs best practices
• The option of installing a Windows Server Core version in the root partition of the Hyper-V role
server is advised when reducing the maintenance, the software attack surface, the memory, and disk
space footprint are critical requirements. Otherwise, when installing a traditional Windows Server
with Hyper-V technology with the GUI, minimize the use of additional software, components and/or
roles in the root partition.
• Exchange Mailbox role servers are characterized by a memory intensive workload. Configure static
memory in the settings of each VM to avoid allowing the dynamic memory management to create
contention between different VMs running on the same host, which could possibly penalize the
Exchange storage I/O execution.
• The use of Non-Uniform Memory Access is advised to address the management of VMs with large
and very large memory settings. Plan for the configuration of affinity between the NUMA nodes and
the VMs depending on the number of either one, available via Windows Management
Instrumentation (WMI) scripting.
• Carefully plan the capacity of the volumes hosting the VMs VHD files, including the space required
for memory file content (.bin), save state, or snapshot files (.vsv). Remember that differencing VHD
files or snapshots of guest VMs hosting Exchange Server 2010 are currently not supported by
Microsoft.
• Isolate the host management traffic from the VM traffic preferring virtual switches not enabled for
management.
• Traffic segregation for different kind of traffic from your VMs requires corresponding virtual
switches, thus host network adapters, to isolate the traffic.
• Avoid mixing LAN and iSCSI traffic on the same virtual adapters: enforced as a consequence of the
LAN and iSCSI network isolation design.
• Select VM network bus adapters with synthetic drivers as opposed to legacy network adapters with
emulated drivers.
• Configure a dedicated virtual switch for each guest network adapter connected to the SAN traffic
(iSCSI) you plan to have in the VM. Maintain a 1:1 ratio between the number of network ports on the
active arrays controller and the number of host/guest network adapters configured on the VMs.
• Aggregate at least two host network adapters in failover teams for each virtual switch in order to
achieve resiliency
• Enable jumbo frames on both the guest network adapters and the corresponding host adapters
assigned to SAN traffic (iSCSI) and to the replication traffic of the Exchange Replication service.
• Enable Large Send Offload, TCP and UDP Checksum Offload for both Rx and Tx on the guest
network adapters connected to the SAN traffic (iSCSI).
• Evaluate jumbo frames for the guest network adapters and the corresponding host adapters
assigned to LAN traffic.
Exchange installation best practices
• Use Windows Basic disk type for all EqualLogic volumes.
• Use GUID partition table (GPT) for Exchange volumes.