If you’re in touch with your geeky side, there’s a good chance that you’re always looking for ways to squeeze more performance out of your IT investments. This is especially true for situations that involve virtualization, where some of the primary motivation is reducing costs through server consolidation.
I have recently written two articles for SearchServerVirtualization.com that cover the topic of monitoring and optimizing your VMs that are hosted on Microsoft Hyper-V. Some might be obvious, but others are somewhat cleverly-disguised. The first article, Optimizing Hyper-V performance: Monitoring tips focuses on ways in which you can make sure your host servers and VMs are running smoothly. From the introduction:
How can you be sure whether your Hyper-V host servers and virtual machines (VMs) have been optimally configured? Installing and enabling Microsoft Hyper-V and creating VMs is a fairly straightforward process; but the techie tendencies in all of us seems to nag the question "Isn’t there something more I should do to improve performance?" This tip targets system administrators who have deployed Hyper-V and want to ensure that they’ve made the most of host servers and VMs.
The second article, Optimizing Hyper-V performance: Advanced fine-tuning provides details on Integration Services, synthetic vs. emulated drivers, and ways in which you can improve overall performance of storage and network resources.
I hope these articles will serve as a useful checklist for Hyper-V management. If you have any further suggestions, feel free to leave them as comments here or on SearchServerVirtualization.com.
