As the Virtualization Administrator, how do you know that you have follow best practice during implementation ?
2nd Question:-
Are you sure that you have do the right thing on your hypervisor server?
Don't worry . Now you easily answer "Yes!" for above question.
Microsoft has recently released new server management tool "Hyper-V Best Practices Analyzer". It's designed to help IT Pro to optimize the way they administer the hypervisor role included in the latest Windows Server operating system. To get this tool, please download from http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/977238?p=1
The tool will scan your Hyper-V server and let you know if there’re any common best practices that you’re not following.
Here is the snapshot of before and after you have install Hyper V Best Practices Analyzer:-
Before install:-
After install:-
You can use Hyper-V Best Practices Analyzer to scan a server that is running the Hyper-V role, and help identify configurations that do not comply with best practices for this role. BPA scans the configuration of the physical computer, the virtual machines, and other resources such as virtual networking or virtual storage. Scan results are displayed as a list that you can sort by severity, and include recommendations for fixing issues and links to instructions. No configuration changes occur automatically by running the scan.
One of the cool feature of the Best Practice Analyzer is the ability to exclude results. This way you can remove best practices that you do not believe apply to your environment – so you’ll not have to deal with large number of unnecessary errors / warnings.
Some sample benchmark that i have received when running on my physical server.
Overall result:-
On each severity, it will describe about your issue and it also included with resolution to solve this issue. For more detail, you can click on "More information link".
Properties of each severity:-
a) Add more NIC. Allocate 1 NIC for management purpose.
b) Use ECC RAM
c) Only run Hyper V role in this server
d) Use Server Core rather than full operating system
e) Avoid using snapshot in production environment
f) Dynamic disk not recommended in production environment
g) Allocate 2GB RAM for this particular VM when running on certain operating system.
Never imagine that BPA will check VM setting as well. Give it a try and you will find more non-compliant configuration on your server.
Enjoy !
