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It depends upon your requirement. There are no hard and fast rules.
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It depends upon your requirement. There are no hard and fast rules.

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Yes, Virtual Machines give you far more benefits than physical machines.<br />
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e.g. Disaster Recovery and backup is one of them.
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Yes, Virtual Machines give you far more benefits than physical machines.

e.g. Disaster Recovery and backup is one of them.

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We are currently running Exchange 2007 and have just purchased Exchange 2013 and new hardware to install it on. &nbsp;We plan to upgrade directly from 2007 to 2013.<br />
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The server has two physical drives mirrored for the OS. &nbsp;The other necessary storage volumes will be mapped up to our Compellent SAN which replicates these volumes to another location.<br />
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I am wondering if I am better off installing Exchange 2013 on a virtual machine that sits on a SAN volume, rather than installing it locally and having the database sit on the SAN volume. &nbsp;This way I can replicate the entire virtual server to another location. &nbsp;Seems like the best option, but looking for opinions as this is new to me.<br />
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The server itself will have Server Standard 2012 installed and would be using Hyper-V.
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We are currently running Exchange 2007 and have just purchased Exchange 2013 and new hardware to install it on.  We plan to upgrade directly from 2007 to 2013.

The server has two physical drives mirrored for the OS.  The other necessary storage volumes will be mapped up to our Compellent SAN which replicates these volumes to another location.

I am wondering if I am better off installing Exchange 2013 on a virtual machine that sits on a SAN volume, rather than installing it locally and having the database sit on the SAN volume.  This way I can replicate the entire virtual server to another location.  Seems like the best option, but looking for opinions as this is new to me.

The server itself will have Server Standard 2012 installed and would be using Hyper-V.

Virtualize Exchange 2013 or not on single node?

Exchange is the server side of a collaborative application product that is part of the Microsoft Server infrastructure. Exchange's major features include email, calendaring, contacts and tasks, support for mobile and web-based access to information, and support for data storage.

Exchange

Within Internet message handling services (MHS), a message transfer agent or mail transfer agent (MTA) or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using a client–server application architecture. A MTA implements both the client (sending) and server (receiving) portions of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host may also refer to a computer performing the MTA function. The Domain Name System (DNS) associates a mail server to a domain with mail exchanger (MX) resource records containing the domain name of a host providing MTA services.

Email Servers

Virtualization is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, including (but not limited to) a virtual computer hardware platform, operating system (OS), storage device, or computer network resources. Virtualization is usually the creation of a system that executes separate from the underlying hardware resources, or the creation of an entire desktop for systems located elsewhere, similar to thin clients.