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Sunday, October 4, 2009

Designing and Best practise for Host in Hyper V

When come to designing host for Hyper V, you need to consider several aspect such as

a) Processor
- Number of processor in a system (number of socket) and Number of cores in a processor (logical processor)

Eg:- 2 socket of Quad core will give you 8 cores of logical processor.

You need to determine the recommended processor needed for each application. The total processor needed for all the system should not exceeded the total logical processor. Remember to allocate 2 cores for the host.

b) Memory
- determine the number of memory for each VM. It is depend on the types of application running on the VM. SQL server and Exchange Server will use more memory. At least 512MB is allocated for the host. Most of the time, i'm allocating 2GB of RAM for the host.

c) NIC
Microsoft does not recommend teaming. Pls refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968703 for more detail. It is advisable to allocate 1 NIC for remote management and allocate 1 NIC for each VM. You need to allocate at least 2 nic for ISCSI connectivity.

d) Storage
It is up to your VM requirement. Additional storage controller and more smaller number of drives is recommended.  Hyper v support SCSI, SAS, iSCSI, IDE and SATA. To have better performance use a higher 10K rpm or 15rpm and higher cache.

e) Host operating system
-use Server Core for secure platform.

f) Parent partition
-Don't run any application in the parent partition
-Don't install any extra server roles in the parent partition

g) Antivirus
You need to set exclusion of virtualization files such as VHD disk and Vm Files configuration.
It is advisable not to run a scan on these files.

That's all.
Hope this information help and guide you when planning for Hyper V.