Hyper-V Virtualization 101: Some Basics Around Hyper-V Setups

Here are some pearls learned over our years working with Hyper-V:

• Host/Node Setup
• Make sure the host and all nodes in a cluster have the BIOS Settings identical (All settings)
• Leave ~1GB to 1.5GB physical RAM to the host
• We leave 1.5GB of space on a dedicated to VM LUN
• We leave ~50GB to ~100GB of free space on a shared LUN/Partition
• We set the MiniDump option and lock the swap file down to 840MB
• wmic RECOVEROS set DebugInfoType = 3
• Always set up a standalone host with two partitions: OS and Data
• Hyper-V
• Hyper-V lays out a file equivalent in size to the vRAM assigned to VMs. We must have space for them.
• Snapshots/CheckPoints create differencing disks. These _grow_ over time.
• Deleting Snapshots/CheckPoints requires enough free space to create an entirely new Parent VHDX.
• vRAM assigned to the VM should not traverse NUMA nodes (performance) (more on hardware).
• vCPUs = Threads in CPU and must be processed in parallel thus # physical cores - 1 is best.
• GHz is preferred over CPU Core counts for most workloads.
• Storage
• Be aware of the IOPS required to run _all_ workloads on the host/nodes.
• More smaller sized spindles is better than less larger size spindles = More IOPS.
• 10GbE should be the minimum bandwidth considered for any iSCSI deployments.
• At least _two_ 10GbE switches are mandatory for the storage path
• Networking
• Broadcom physical NIC ports must always have VMQ turned off (blog post)
• We prefer to use Intel Gigabit and 10Gb Ethernet Server Adapters
• We start with a minumum of 4 physical ports in our hosts/nodes
• UPS Systems
• UPS Systems should have at least 1-1.5 Hours of runtime.
• Host/Nodes and storage should be tested for shutdown durations.

There are quite a lot of these types of posts on our blog. Please click through the category tags to find more!

Thanks for reading.

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book