DISASTER RECOVERY/COMPLIANCE

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

DATA CENTER MANAGEMENT

STORAGE ARCHITECTURE

BI/APPLICATIONS

VIRTUALIZATION

Handbook
SECURITY

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CLOUD

DESIGNING A MISSION-CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Virtualizing MissionCritical Applications

Mission-critical applications no longer have to be conned to physical hardware. But before you virtualize the applications that keep your business running, learn how to avoid performance and availability issues.

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VIRTUAL APPLICATION PERFORMANCE TESTING: AN ART FORM

THE PROS AND CONS OF VIRTUALIZING SQL SERVER ENVIRONMENTS

EXCHANGE 2013 STORAGE CONSIDERATIONS WHEN VIRTUALIZING ON HYPER-V

EDITORS NOTE

Getting to Know Your Enterprise Apps

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Many companies have moved past the question of Why should we virtualize our enterprise applications? to How should we virtualize them? Yes, security, performance and availability are still major concerns for these important applications, but the advantages of virtualization often outweigh those issueswhich can generally be addressed with good testing, migration and management policies. In this handbook, Mark Vaughn offers an overview of issues concerning virtualizing enterprise applications, including tier-one and mission-critical applications. By detailing the various types of applications that can be safely virtualized, he outlines how to design a virtual architecture that will sustain even performance-intensive apps. The trick, he says, is understanding and preparing for the particularities of each application before migrating. Supporting that idea of getting better acquainted with your applications, Mike Nelsons article discusses the important of testing virtual apps. Nelson outlines steps for evaluating how your application will perform in a virtual environment, but his most important point is that theres no one approach that will work every time in the dynamic world of virtualizing a companys critical resourceshence why he denes testing as more of an art form than an exact science.

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The nal articles in this handbook provide guidance for virtualizing two of the most critical and commonly used applications. Basit Farooq takes you through the pros and cons of virtualizing SQL Server and Serdar Yegulalp gives valuable tips concerning storage for IT pros looking to virtualize Exchange 2013 with Hyper-V. With their advice, youll nd out if your organization is ready to virtualize its applications. n
Laura Aberle Associate Features Editor

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Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure

In IT, many users have abandoned physical servers and traveled far down the virtualization road. As virtualization has moved from the trendy minority to the trusted majority, those who have resisted it are considered dinosaurs clinging to yesterdays practices. But one has to ask, Are they resisting the inevitable or are they simply protecting their business? When the ability to conduct business is on the line, IT departments exercise an abundance of caution. For some, the prospect of virtualizing mission-critical applications has been considered off-limits because, frankly, why x what isnt broken? But over the past few years, this Why x what isnt broken? mentality has shifted concerning virtualizing critical applications.

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WHAT IS A MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATION?

A mission-critical application is an essential component of core business functions. A failure or interruption in a mission-critical application can have a severe impact on an organizations ability to conduct business. The term tier-one application is often used synonymously, though it refers to the performance needs of

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an application. A tier-one application requires nely tuned resources and reliable hardware to provide the desired performance metrics. While it cannot be said that all mission-critical applications are also tier-one applications, it is highly likely that any tier-one applications will be mission-critical. So, rst, it may be time to revisit the Why x A physical server what isnt broken? philosophy of deploying missionnow holds more critical applications. Five years ago, if a physical server compute resources used only a third of the available processing power, or than the average just a fraction of the available memory resources, it operating system would be labeled as broken. That is exactly where we or software platnd ourselves in todays data center. A physical server form can use. now holds more compute resources than the average operating system or software platform can use. In a physical server environment, efforts are being needlessly replicated, valuable resources are left untapped, and power consumption is increasing. At the same time, the value of these mission-critical applications is constant. What was once conservative and safe is now beginning to look broken. With the power of modern server hardware and hypervisors, you no longer sacrice high-end performance to gain the high-availability and resource consumption benets of virtualization. Given their ability to fully exploit the vast amount of resources available in modern x86 servers, virtual platforms can often

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yield the same performance as physical servers, if not better. A virtual server is also portable, no longer tied to a specic piece of hardware. In terms of availability and disaster recovery, this is a signicant advantage. Whereas recovering a physical system often requires a second set of identical hardware, almost any x86 hardware can now be enlisted to recover a virtual server. And what application could be more in need of a solid and efcient disaster recovery or high-availability solution than a mission-critical application? In fact, even if an applications virtual performance may not match the performance in a physical environment, availability gains could outweigh small dips in performance.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR VIRTUALIZING MISSION-CRITICAL APPS

Once the decision has been made to virtualize, you need to build appropriate strategies for virtualizing mission-critical applications. You may need to develop unique strategies for each. If one application has multiple components, evaluate the benets of afnity and anti-afnity rules, which control where virtual machines (VMs) can be located, to either keep components on the same physical host or to force them to run from separate hosts. In some cases, you may want to run from the same host to improve performance. Other applications may require the resilience of spreading infrastructure components out on different hosts. You may also need to organize hypervisor clusters or use afnity rules to adhere to licensing

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Home Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

requirements. Though it is rare, you may also want to consider dedicating an entire virtualization host to one VM. This is usually done for licensing or performance reasons. Even though it does not aid in consolidation and reducing footprint, it provides advantages in the areas of availability and recoverability. Another critical decision is how to move the workload from a physical server to a virtual one. While physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion tools may be adequate for other applications, be careful about using them with mission-critical applications. The settings of the OS and subsequent applications were originally customized for a physical server, and though conversion tools are designed to nd and adjust these settings during migration to a VM, a setting can be overlooked. When every millisecond counts in the performance and availability of an application, you dont want to bring over artifacts from an install that was not intended for the virtual server. Treat this migration like a hardware refresh. The operating system and applications should be installed fresh. Where feasible, even conguration les should be created anew. Recognizing that manually recreating congurations may also introduce risk, use your knowledge of the application or contact the application vendor for advice in deciding which congurations can be safely migrated without carrying over legacy attributes. Since each application may require a unique approach, below are some examples of the thought process behind a few popular mission-critical workloads.

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n Web

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servers. Web servers are often inexpensive resources, almost a commodity in many organizations. They have low resource demands and are often deployed in groups. Few organizations would consider a Web server a mission-critical application. But an Internet presence is essential to conducting business in todays environment. Targeting Web servers are a win-win for virtualization. They have a small footprint that is easy to virtualize, and they benet greatly from the high availability and agility offered by virtualization. Demand for Web servers can also be closely linked to seasonal trends and business cycles, allowing them to benet from virtualizations ability to rapidly deploy and decommission VMs. The best method is to rst create a virtual Web server and migrate a website to it, as that will result in a cleaner VM. However, Web servers are generally highly tolerant of minor imperfections in OS congurations. Though not always recommended, Web servers can also be virtualized using physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration tools.
n Application

servers. Application servers cover a range of performance proles. Depending on the application they host, they can be anything from a small server hosting a simple JSP or .NET application to a large server hosting a complex Java application. Size and complexity of application servers often have a direct correlation to the role an application plays within a business. With a complex Java application, the application server is both mission-critical and a tier-one

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resourceand the size and complexity of the application also make it difcult to deploy. Regardless of whether it is physical or virtual, deploying an application server requires precision tuning of the OS and the application. Virtualization provides several advantages here. In many cases, the underlying infrastructure is more easily tuned in a virtual environment: This includes network devices, CPU resources, memory and other key resources. After the tedious task of tuning infrastructure, the OS and the application to achieve the desired performance, virtualization allows you to quickly and easily create a clone of that VM. This makes Never use a physfuture deployments more efcient and accurate. By ical-to-virtual decoupling the VM from the physical hardware, it migration tool to also insulates the application server administrators virtualize a misfrom having to reproduce this effort every time a sion-critical appnew hardware platform is adopted. lication server. As application performance can be closely linked to underlying infrastructure, do not take the task of virtualizing an application server lightly. Though not difcult, it can be a time-consuming task of tuning resources, measuring performance and then adjusting resources again. Under no circumstances should you use a P2V migration tool to virtualize a mission-critical, tier-one application server. This brings over too many legacy settings from one hardware platform to

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another, and overcomplicates the conguration tasks required to create a stable environment.
n Database

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servers. Unlike Web servers and application servers, database servers are rarely congured to spread production workloads across multiple resources. More often, databases are deployed in an active/passive cluster as a single standalone resource. Database servers can be even more complex and sensitive to OS congurations than application servers, and signicantly more resource-intensive. All these attributes should indicate a ashing caution sign for any virtualization administrator who wants to virtualize a database server workload. But even the biggest and most complicated database servers can benet from virtualization. Granted, some daThe more complex tabases may require 100% of a virtualization hosts a con guration, the resources, but the high-availability and portability more likely it is to features provided may justify the effort. experience issues Many databases can exploit software clusterfrom human error. ing features to provide a rapid recovery of database services in the event of a hardware failure. Unfortunately, these features can also require expensive licensing and result in a very complex conguration. The more complex a conguration, the more likely it is to experience issues from human error. In contrast,

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Home Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

most hypervisors provide high-availability features that can move a failed database server to new hardware and reboot it almost as quickly as software clustering can restore the same database services. High availability within the hypervisor does not require additional database software licensing and will not require any complicated congurations in the database environment. What may add only one to two minutes to automated recovery tasks can save hours in maintenance tasks. Like an application server, a database server must be tuned to the specic hardware resources and operating system that make up the underlying infrastructure. While this makes the use of P2V tools difcult, it also complicates the task of restoring a reliable database service on disaster recovery hardware. However, when the database server is built and tuned for virtual hardware, almost any x86 server platform will make a suitable recovery host.
n Microsoft

Exchange. Microsoft Exchange is an excellent example of a highperformance environment that thrives on virtual hardware. At the same time, Exchange 2010 introduces new features that illustrate why it is important to know your application before you virtualize it. Microsoft Exchange 2010 introduced Database Availability Groups (DAGs). A DAG synchronizes data from multiple servers, allowing for almost immediate failover of a workload with a purely software solution. A DAG will work between any combination of virtual and physical hardware platforms. With this feature and

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the relative ease of deploying and maintaining it, why virtualize Exchange? Virtualization still provides several advantages in an Exchange environment. While software features may offer a rapid failover of services, a down server will still lead to diminished capacity. While the environment runs on diminished resources, the remaining servers are carrying additional workload, increasing the risk of a second and more costly failure. This is where a hypervisor platform can quickly detect a failure and reboot a VM on another server, thus restoring redundancy within the environment. Since Microsoft Exchange supports the live migration of mailboxes, using P2V tools to move a physical Exchange deployment to a virtual environment is not necessary.

MEASURE TWICE, MIGRATE ONCE

Never forget that you are dealing with critical infrastructure. These environments should already have monitoring tools in place to measure response times, performance metrics and availability. Before making changes, have solid data to provide a baseline of how the environment behaved prior to those changes. Also ensure that you have at least 45 days of data, to include any weekly and/ or monthly business cycles that may generate uctuations in usage and performance. If an application slows down the week after it is virtualized, no one will

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acknowledge that the performance is normal during month-end processing. All that users will know is that you virtualized the application and now it is slow. Have before-and-after snapshots to defend against these attacks or to troubleshoot the valid issues that may emerge. The more granular the reporting, the better. Some issues will be real, most will be imagined, but all must be given the attention that mission-critical applications deserve. There is a difference between what can be virtualized and what should be virtualized. However, in the end, the arguments against virtualizing mission-critical applications are simply losing their validity. The advantages to virtualizing these applications are too great to overlook. With a well-designed virtual solution, it is very difcult for an organization to argue against virtualizing. Mark Vaughn

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Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form

Once you prioritize which applications to virtualize, its important to test their performance. Application performance testing is the best way to learn how virtual applications will fare in a virtual infrastructure and what the end-user experience will be like. Virtual application performance testing is exactly thattesting. Some people consider it a science, but I think of it as an art form. You can get creative with testing to generate the best performance, but it wont replicate how your virtual applications will perform in production.

Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

PRE-TESTING FACTORS: SOFTWARE AND THE USERS

Application performance testing is an essential part of any solid virtual application planparticularly for tier-one and mission-critical applications. By performing some quick load testswith some willing users enlisted as guinea pigsyou can experiment with the hypervisor and the apps themselves to achieve the desired performance results. But as you tinker with virtual applications, dont neglect user experience. If a

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Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

virtualized application runs as well as it did on physical hardware (or better), you shouldnt worry too much about users expectations. In some cases, though, you might think twice about virtualizing an application if, as a result, it would no longer look the same on the users end. For example, if an application is Virtualizing applicavisually intensive and is not a true client/server tions saves resources app, but rather a simple Remote Desktop Protocol and spacewhich is (RDP) session-accessed application, a users daily great for admins interactions with the application are most imporbut it wont always tant. Virtualizing applications saves resources and benet the user. spacewhich is great for adminsbut it wont always benet the user. Finally, remember that not everyone has the luxury of a full-blown testing lab or the available users for application performance testing. Thankfully, some software manufacturers produce load-testing software from application vendors themselves to third-party providers.

VIRTUAL APPLICATION PERFORMANCE TESTING CONSIDERATIONS

The following are some important factors to consider before you begin virtual application performance testing.

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n Host

afnity. What are the application vendor requirements, if any? Can you run one application on the same hostor even in the same Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) or high-availability clusteras another application? Host afnity is a requirement in some infrastructures, and in others it just makes good sense.
n Resource

Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

afnity. Again, is this a vendor requirement? It may be necessary to dedicate quantities of the core ve resourcesCPU, RAM, disk, network interface cards and USBto ensure the best performance and support for virtual applications.
n Shares and resource pools. In my experience, these resources dont enter into the

equation until the end of the process, but you should consider resource quantities up front. Determine the amount of resources your guest machine and its virtual applications will use. Dont leave the hypervisors resource allocation at the default amount. You can ne-tune shares throughout the application performance testing process to see whats best for each virtualized application. clusters. To improve performance and management, create a cluster with an isolated set of servers that host common or interacting applications.
n Application n Dedicated

stacking. With the ultrafast and capacity-heavy hosts that exist

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today, its possible to stack two or three applications on one virtual server. But its not advisable with bigger applications. Stacking can be a great thing, but it can also be problematic if virtual applications dont cooperate with one another.
n Inter-application

Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

cooperation. From the physical server world, we know all too well that some applications just dont play well with others in the sandbox. Some virtualized applications wont interact well with others on the same guest, host or cluster. And some just cannot be virtualized at all. As you begin virtual application performance testing, create a baseline of servers and a load thats as similar as possible to whats on the physical server. Its not always possible to test virtual applications with 100% accuracy, but you should be able to get close. Also, keep in mind that some problems might emerge only after testing is done and you compare the data. If you think of application performance testing as an art, youll nd some creative ways to boost performance. Mike Nelson

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The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments

Virtualization is a hot trend in the computing world, offering businesses substantial cost and performance benets that include server consolidation, reduced power consumption and the effortless creation of virtual development and test environments. As a result of this trend, many organizations are interested in virtualizing SQL Server, and for a good reason. The benets of virtualized environments increase business continuity and allowdatabase administrators(DBAs) and IT professionals to build an agile IT infrastructure. But many DBAs are unsure if the benets of virtualizing SQL Server are worth the risks.

Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

ADVANTAGES OF VIRTUALIZING SQL SERVER

n Reduced

data center footprint with database server consolidation. Production SQL Server environments can benet from server consolidation with virtualization because it can drastically reduce the number of physical servers and minimize the administrative workloads through centralized management. With Hyper-V technology, we can host multiple virtual database servers on the same physical machine while maintaining complete isolation at the operating system level. This

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Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

allows us to manage performance, security, manageability and business continuity for each virtual application server independently. It also gives us the exibility to run multiple operating systems on the same hardware, as required by specic applications. This means we can virtualize multiple underutilized physical SQL servers on a single powerful physical server. As a result of this approach, we end up managing a small number of physical servers, which simplies the administration, reduces operational, maintenance and hardware costs, and saves data center space. licensing and operational costs. As mentioned, reducing the number of physical database servers also reduces data center operational costs because of reduced power and cooling requirements. Furthermore, by virtualizing SQL Server environments, we can make signicant license cost savings, because the number of licenses required is reduced. For example, each physical server requires licenses for the operating system and utility software. By reducing the number of physical servers, we ensure we do not need these additional licenses. License costs are also dependent on the software and technology used for virtualization. For example, with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, we can eliminate the need to purchase separate virtualization software. We can reduce the license cost even further by taking advantage of premium edition licensing. For instance,
n Reduced

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we can purchase licenses for our physical servers, and then use those physical servers to run as many instances of SQL Server within virtual machines (VMs). Remember, though, we can host only three VMs on a Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition licensed physical server and an unlimited number of VMs with a Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition licensed physical server.
n Better

Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

manageability through centralized administration. The virtualization of SQL Server environments simplies administration because we can manage these VMs from a single location using such tools as Remote Desktop Services (RDS) or System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which help DBAs and IT professionals manage their physical and virtual infrastructure from a central location.
n Improved

high-availability and disaster recovery solutions. A virtualized SQL Server environment provides improved high-availability and disaster recovery features. For example, we can cluster our physical hosts running Hyper-V, back up ourVirtual Hard Disk(VHD) or implement guest OS clustering using the SQL Server AlwaysOn feature. This will ensure that our environment is protected against virtualized infrastructure failures such as SQL Server instance failure. We may also use database mirroringto protect our critical SQL Server environment from a shared-drive failure.

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DISADVANTAGES OF VIRTUALIZING SQL SERVER

n Scalability

Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

and performance. Although virtualization is suitable for most situations, it is not always the right solution. For example, it is not ideal to virtualize CPU- or memory-intensive SQL Servers. Also, virtualization requires additional hardware resources, but the problem is that its almost impossible to estimate in advance how many additional resources will be needed. In addition, some SQL servers can experience performance degradation after they are virtualized. Properly benchmark the performance of SQL Server in the virtual environment and test the solution carefully before implementing it in the production environment.
n Single-point

failure. Fault tolerance is another issue with virtualizing SQL Server environments, since hardware failure on the host will also bring down all guests running on that host. This problem can be eliminated by clustering hosts.
n Security.

Security is also a concern in virtualized SQL Server environments. If the security of your host is compromised, the security of all guests running on that host will also be compromised.
n Software support. Many software vendors still do not support their applications

if you are hosting their application databases in a virtualized environment. When you consider going virtual, keep all these concerns in mind. Basit Farooq

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Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

The Exchange Server virtualization scenarios available today are much broader than those of a few years ago. Restrictions remain, but they are far less obtrusive. This year, many companies will examine virtualizing Exchange 2013 on Microsoft Hyper-V. The most glaring restrictions here are the storage requirements, which are critical to Exchange virtual machine (VM) mailbox databases and transport queues. If youre migrating to the newest version of Exchange and preparing for a virtual setup, you should know exactly how virtualized Exchange 2013 storage will work. Here are the ve most important aspects to keep in mind: 1. Virtual disk size for all Exchange instances must be xed. Like many hypervisor and VM products, Microsoft Hyper-V lets you create virtual disks that will dynamically expand up to a predetermined size. For example, if you designate a virtual disk with a 250 GB maximum size, but youre only using 100 GB, the corresponding dynamically expanding virtual disk le will be only 100 GB. Fixed-size virtual disks, however, use a virtual disk le. Virtual disk les pre-allocate all the space required for the virtual disk. In other words, a 250

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GB virtual disk will use a 250 GB le. Fixed disks will help eliminate the performance issues you may see with dynamically expanding disks. 2. Block-level storage is required for all direct-attached devices. Hyper-V allows for direct-attached storage (DAS), which in turn lets a VM directly write to a storage device instead of to a virtual-disk le on said device. This increases performance. However, any such direct-attached devices must use block-level storage; they cant be network-attached storage(NAS) devices. However, they can be iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet or another storage area network (SAN)-type device. The reason for this is simple. For Exchange 2013 storage to function properly, Exchange needs low-level access to the device because of how it works with its databases; NAS doesnt expose enough low-level functionality for Exchange. Additionally, exposing a NAS to the hypervisor, and then sharing it out to Exchange 2013 as a storage medium doesnt work. 3. Avoid using differencing storage mechanisms. This is especially true for snapshotting and differencing Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) in Microsoft HyperV. The problem with snapshots and differencing VHDs is that they never completely capture the entire state of a given Exchange installation, which is often spread out across multiple storage devices at once.

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Snapshotting an Exchange installation and then attempting to roll it back might create inconsistencies across the various databases, with a broken Exchange installation as a potential end result. Until Hyper-Vs snapshotting becomes application-awarewhich I dont foresee for a whileyou should avoid using differencing VHDs or snapshots in virtualized Exchange 2013. 4. Allocate enough space for each virtualized instance of Exchange. For each instance of Exchange to be virtualized, Microsoft recommends allocating disk space using the following formula: 15 GB plus the amount of virtual memory allocated to the VM in question. Therefore, a VM with 32 GB of RAM would need at least 47 GB of disk space for the OS, the paging le and Exchange 2013s own les. If you can throw more space at the problem, go for it, but this is the bare minimum. This space does not include Exchanges databases; its just the minimum amount of space required for Exchange 2013 plus the OS. Databases should always be on a separate volume anyway. 5. Your Exchange 2010 storage plans should still work. When prepping for Exchange 2013 storage, remember that Microsoft recommends roughly the same planning requirements that were laid out forExchange 2010. If you still have the storage calculator numbers you used to plan your Exchange 2010 setup,

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they should still prove useful. That said, any plans devised under earlier editions of Exchange Server should be revamped, especially if youre performing a physical-to-virtual migration.

Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

FINAL THOUGHTS

The points discussed above indicate a number of possible future changes for how Exchange 2013 storage will be handled when virtualized on Hyper-V. The most important takeaway here is how Hyper-V could be made application-aware to allow snapshotting of Exchange instances. That said, the scenarios where this functionality would be useful dont involve Exchange itself but are experiments involving Exchange indirectly. For example, think of multiple iterations of the same setup to gauge differences between them. Right now, Hyper-V supports more than enough of the functionality you need to create and maintain a solid instance of Exchange 2013, as long as you keep in mind the rules for allocating storage for both the hypervisor and Exchange Server itself. Serdar Yegulalp

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

MARK VAUGHN (MBA, VCP, BEA-CA) serves as

Home Editors Note Designing a Mission-Critical Infrastructure Virtual Application Performance Testing: An Art Form The Pros and Cons of Virtualizing SQL Server Environments Exchange 2013 Storage Considerations When Virtualizing on Hyper-V

an enterprise architect for a multinational corporation. Vaughn has more than 14 years of experience in IT as a Unix administrator, developer, Web hosting administrator, IT manager and enterprise architect. Vaughn is a recipient of the 2009 vExpert award and has delivered several presentations at VMworld and BEAWorld conferences in the U.S. and Europe. Read his blog at http://blog.mvaughn.us. has been in IT for more than 20 years, with exposure to a diverse eld of technologies and solutions. He has devoted more than half a decade to virtualization and server-based computing. Currently, Nelson is a senior analyst at a Fortune 100 company in the U.S. Midwest.
MIKE NELSON

Virtualizing Mission-Critical Applications is a SearchServerVirtualization.com e-publication. Margie Semilof | Editorial Director Lauren Horwitz | Executive Editor Phil Sweeney | Managing Editor Eugene Demaitre | Associate Managing Editor Laura Aberle | Associate Features Editor Linda Koury | Director of Online Design Neva Maniscalco | Graphic Designer Rebecca Kitchens | Publisher rkitchens@techtarget.com TechTarget 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com
2013 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group. About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts.

is a lead database administrator, trainer and technical author. He has more than a decade of IT experience in development, technical training and database administration on Microsoft SQL Server platforms. Farooq has authored numerous SQL Server technical articles. He has also developed and implemented many successful database infrastructure, data warehouse and business intelligence projects.
BASIT FAROOQ

has been writing about personal computing and IT for more than 15 years for a variety of publications, including Windows Magazine, InformationWeek and the TechTarget family of sites.
SERDAR YEGULALP

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