6 Best Practices for Physical Servers Hosting Hyper-V Roles
From the Microsoft Press ebook Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions: From the Desktop to the Datacenter by Mitch Tulloch.
- Avoid Overloading the Server
- Ensure High-Speed Access to Storage
- Install Multiple Network Interface Cards
- Configure Antivirus Software to Bypass Hyper-V Processes and Directories
- Avoid Storing System Files on Drives Used for Hyper-V Storage
- Monitor Performance to Optimize and Manage Server Loading
Here are 23 Best Practices to improve Hyper-V and VM Performance
by Nirmal Sharma
- Avoid overloading Hyper-V Server
- Avoid creation of multiple Virtual Network Switches
- Configure antivirus software to bypass Hyper-V processes and directories
- Avoid Mixing Virtual Machines that can or cannot use Integration Service components
- Avoid storing system files on drives used for Hyper-V storage
- Use separate volumes for each VM
- Avoid single point of failure for network adapters using NIC Teaming
- Always use Network Isolation Mechanism rather than creating a separate virtual switch
- Install Multiple Network Interface cards on Hyper-V Server
- Always use supported guest Operating Systems
- Always use Generation Type 2 Virtual Machines
- Always change the default location for storing virtual machine configuration and VHD files
- Monitor performance of Hyper-V Server for optimization
- De-fragment Hyper-V Server regularly or before creating a virtual hard disk
- Always install the Integration Components on the supported virtual machines
- Always use Fixed VHD files
- Use Dynamic Memory Feature
- Configure SCSI disks for Data volumes
- Relocate paging file to a SCSI Disk Controller
- Always exclude Paging file for virtual machines participating in Hyper-V Replication
- Implement Hyper-V in Server Core in Production environment
- Close unnecessary Windows
- Use Certified Hardware
Maximizing Hyper-V Performance
Learn the best practises to optimize Hyper-V by Michael Otey
Hyper-V Host Performance Tips
Hyper-V offers extreme scalability with VM’s of up to 64 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM. However, in order to maximize the performance of your Hyper-V platform there are several best practices that you should follow for the both the Hyper-V host and VM guests. For the host:
- Reserve the parent partition for Hyper-V — Do not run other roles or applications in the parent partition. The parent platform should be reserved for managing Hyper-V. Running other applications in it will degrade of the performance of all your VMs
- Reserve 1GB for Hyper-V partition – The parent partition needs RAM to manage the various VMs and worker threads. Don’t allocate all of the available RAM to the VMs.
- Don’t over allocate your cores – For maximum performance ensure the each VM has a physical core to handle its workload. A rule of thumb for the best VM performance is 1 CPU core per vCPU.
- Don’t run Hyper-V Manager all the time – Hyper-V Manager is an application and will take resources form your VMs. Don’t leave it up all the time. It’s better to manage Hyper-V from a networked system.
Hyper-V Guest VM Performance Tips
For the guest Hyper-V VMs you should:
- Use enlighten guest OSes – Enlightened OS can take advantage of higher performance synthetic drivers that use fewer host CPU cycles.
- Consider separating the paging file from the boot drive – Separating the I/O of the paging file can help improve VM performance. Use a VHD or VHDX that is sized at 1.5x the VM RAM.
- Don’t use checkpoints on production servers – Checkpoints are great for test, lab and help desk systems but they increase I/O requirements which will degrade the performance of production servers.
The New Way
If you’re looking for a very modern way to check and monitor performance, you should give Performance Analyzer a try.
Monitor and Analyze Microsoft Hyper-V configuration and performance metrics. Correlate events and metrics in guest applications and infrastructure with Hyper-V metrics. Troubleshoot issues using our efficient data crawler and preconfigured dashboards.
Some of our VMware vSphere integration features are:
- Find Disk I/O bottlenecks
- Full insights into Disk Latency and VM Disk IOps
- See Memory Issues (Swapping) and Network Issues (Packet Loss) instantly
- See Host OS (MS Windows) bottlenecks and most important performance metrics