There is no hotter subject that performance tuning. Or so some people think :-) Here are some great tips for Hyper-V (R2). And no these articles are not from Microsoft.

In this article series Paul Schnackenburg first looks at design ideas for a Hyper-V environment, then some performance tips and gotchas and finally recommendations for how to measure performance.

Part 1 is about Virtual Processors. One of the first hurdles you have to overcome when you’re designing your Hyper-V infrastructure is working out how many VMs will fit on each host. Today the main limitation for VM density is memory; this will also be true after the introduction of Dynamic Memory in SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. Another issue is how to assign processor power to different VMs.

Part 2 is about memory, networking, storage and networking. Optimizing memory for VMs is a challenge in Hyper-V of today as the memory you assign to each VM is fixed whether the VM actually uses it or not. The good news it’s going to become a whole lot easier when Microsoft releases SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Dynamic Memory comes into play. Storage is always a tricky part of server design and no less so in the virtual world. The main issue with any virtualization platform (unless you’re using pass through disks) is that any disk optimization that an application does is lost as the “hard drive” that the application sees is actually a huge file stored on a drive. A mistake I sometime see is looking mostly at memory and processing power when sizing a Hyper-V platform. Networking is very important, allocating enough network capacity to VMs is vital, especially if your VMs are busy file- or database- servers. If you can afford it 10 GB Ethernet is a fantastic way of allocating enough pipe.

Part 3 is about Hyper-V performance tuning tips and tricks. These are the areas discussed:

• Integration components
• Guest OS
• Hyper-V Manager
• Services
• Host OS
• Background CPU activity
• Network configuration

Part 4 is about monitoring Hyper-V. Seasoned sys admins have a good idea of how to use Task Manager and Performance Monitor to understand what’s going on when there’s a server performance issue. Those skills transfer well to the virtual world but there are some gotchas that we’ll cover in this article.

Source:

• Hyper-V Performance Tuning – Part 4: Monitoring Hyper-V
  • Hyper-V Performance Tuning – Part 3: Tips and tricks
  • Hyper-V Performance Tuning – Part 2: Memory, Storage, Networking
  • Hyper-V performance tuning – Part 1: Virtual processors