Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

By Benedict Berger and Romain Serre

If you are working with Hyper-V and want to optimize its performance and effectiveness, this book is for you. This book will help you close the gap between the Hyper-V lab and production environments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785880759

Book preview

Table of Contents

Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Accelerating Hyper-V Deployment

Why Hyper-V projects fail

Planning your environment

Preparing your host systems

About Nano Server

Creating unattended installation files

Adding basic components

Which edition to install

Decide whether to GUI

Hyper-V hosts in Active Directory domains

Activating Hyper-V features

Post-installation tasks

Antivirus on a Hyper-V host

Setting the pagefile

Creating virtual machines

Summary

2. Deploying Highly Available Hyper-V Clusters

Preparing for a high availability scenario

Planning an HA environment

Overview of the failover cluster

Failover cluster prerequirements

Hardware requirements

Network design

Storage design

Server and software requirements

Implementing failover clusters

Quorum configuration

Live migration configuration

VM start ordering

Node fairness

Cluster-Aware Updating

Guest clustering

Network design for a guest cluster

Storage design for a guest cluster

Summary

3. Backup and Disaster Recovery

Protecting a Hyper-V environment

Hyper-V Replica

Enabling Hyper-V Replica

Preparing the first host

Preparing additional hosts

Activate VM replication

Monitoring Hyper-V Replica

Hyper-V Replica testing and failover

Azure Site Recovery

Replica workloads

Storage Replica

Backup of virtual machines

Microsoft Azure Backup

Summary

4. Storage Best Practices

Storage overview

SANs versus Storage Spaces

NTFS versus Resilient File System (ReFS)

Storage Spaces and tiering

Storage Spaces Direct

Storage Spaces direct - disaggregated model

Storage spaces direct: hyperconverged model

Storage devices configuration

Multi-Resilient virtual disks

Working with virtual disks

Cluster shared volumes

Checkpoints

Data deduplication

Storage quality of service

Multipath I/O

The iSCSI target

Summary

5. Network Best Practices

Networking overview

Virtual switch

External vSwitch

Internal vSwitch

Private vSwitch

Virtual interface

NIC Teaming

Switch Embedded Teaming

Converged networking

Storage network

SMB Direct

Advanced networking options

Network controller

IPAM

Summary

6. Highly Effective Hyper-V Design

Cautious network selection

Hyper-V cluster with SAN or NAS

iSCSI architecture overview

Fibre channel architecture overview

Network configuration

Storage configuration

Operating system configuration

iSCSI configuration

SAN configuration

Storage Spaces Direct design

Network design

Disaggregated model

Storage nodes configuration

Compute nodes configuration

Hyperconverged model

Summary

7. Hyper-V Performance Tuning

Measuring performance

Performance counter

Disk performance

Memory performance

Network performance

RDMA and SMB Direct performance

Processor performance

Performance tuning

Hyper-V power options and green IT

Hardware-tuning options

Network-hardware-tuning options

Receive Side Scaling (RSS)

Single Root IO Virtualization

Other offload capabilities

Using IPv6 with Hyper-V

Storage tuning options

Offloaded Data Transfer

Shutdown tuning options

Setting the shutdown timeout

Hyper-V benchmarking

Hyper-V for virtual desktops

Using RemoteFX

Common configuration mistakes

Design misjudged

Network teaming

Storage configuration

Operating system maintenance

Summary

8. Management with System Center and Azure

Microsoft System Center

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

System Center Operations Manager

System Center Service Manager

System Center Orchestrator

System Center Data Protection Manager

Automatic System Center deployment

Microsoft Azure

Azure Site Recovery

Azure Backup

Log Analytics

Azure Automation

Summary

9. Migration to Hyper-V 2016

Upgrading single Hyper-V hosts

Importing virtual machines

Exporting virtual machines

Cross-version live migration

Copy cluster roles wizard

Rolling cluster upgrade

Migrating VMware virtual machines

System Center VMM

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter

Microsoft Automation Toolkit

MAT powered by Project Shift

Other V2V scenarios

Physical to Virtual conversions

Virtualizing domain controllers

Summary

Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

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Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

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First published: November 2014

Second edition: October 2016

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Credits

About the Authors

Benedict Berger was the author of the first edition of this book (Hyper-V Best Practices by Packt Publishing). He works as a technology solutions professional at Microsoft. He blogs on the German Virtualization Blog (http://blogs.technet.com/b/germanvirtualizationblog/) and on his personal blog (http://blog.benedict-berger.de).

Romain Serre works in Lyon as a senior consultant. He is focused on Microsoft Technology, especially on Hyper-V, System Center, Storage, networking, and Cloud OS technology such as Microsoft Azure or Azure Stack. He is an MVP and a certified Microsoft Certified Solution Expert (MCSE Server Infrastructure and Private Cloud), on Hyper-V and on Microsoft Azure (implementing a Microsoft Azure solution). He blogs at http://www.tech-coffee.net.

About the Reviewer

Romeo Mlinar has been working as the head of the IT department at an IT company in Zagreb, Croatia. Professionally, he is connected with computer technology for more than a decade. He is passionately devoted to Microsoft products and technology, such as, System Center, Team Foundation Server, planning and design of Active Directory, as well as Windows Server services, devoting special attention to virtualization (Hyper-V), which is his recent preoccupation. He holds a large number of Microsoft industrial certifications, such as MCSA, MCSE, MCDST, MCTS, MCDBA, MCITP, MCS: Server Virtualization, MCSE: Private Cloud, MCSE: Server Infrastructure, and so on. Since 2012, he is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Cloud and Datacenter Management [Hyper-V]. He is a regular speaker at various IT conferences regionally and abroad. Also, he is an IT Pro User Group Zagreb lead. He spends his free time with people from the IT world, acquiring new knowledge, eagerly sharing it with others, while at the same time enjoying his life with his family. He blogs at http://blog.mlinar.biz/.

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Preface

Today we virtualize datacenters to gain flexibility, scalability, high-end performance, and ease of management. Moreover, virtualization has brought a high level of consolidation. This enables us to reduce the footprint of the datacenter and save power. For some years, we have wanted to manage our datacenter using the Cloud model. We wanted to create server quickly, improve the performance of this machine on the fly, and delete it when we don't need it anymore.

All of this can be done, thanks to hypervisor. There are several hypervisors such as VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, or Microsoft Hyper-V. Because this book is called Hyper-V Best Practices, we will focus on Hyper-V.

Microsoft has released a major Windows Server version toward the end of 2016. This book focusses on Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016. A lot of new features have been provided in this new version but several rules can be applied to Hyper-V in a previous release.

This book is not intended to explain you all feature mechanisms included in Hyper-V. To follow this book, some knowledge of Hyper-V is required. However, because Hyper-V doesn't work alone, you also need to know about Failover Cluster, Active Directory, storage, and network.

Fasten your seat belts and welcome to this Hyper-V journey.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Accelerating Hyper-V Deployment, gives you some tips to automate Hyper-V and VM deployment, because, in a huge environment, you may want to automate some tasks to limit human errors and to save time.

Chapter 2, Deploying Highly Available Hyper-V Clusters, teaches you how to deploy a Hyper-V cluster and how to leverage it to keep your application working, because, in production, you usually want high availability to keep the application working even in cases of incidents.

Chapter 3, Backup and Disaster Recovery, describes how to leverage Windows Server 2016 and Microsoft Azure to back up your workloads and to failover in another room in case of a disaster because companies want to always back up their workloads and make a Disaster Recovery Plan in case a datacenter is out of order.

Chapter 4, Storage Best Practices, introduces some best practices to leverage the best of your underlying storage system because the storage is a significant piece in a virtual environment. Without good storage, you can expect poor performance.

Chapter 5, Network Best Practices, describes some best practices about the network and Hyper-V, because, similar to the storage, the network is a masterpiece for your virtual environment, especially when implementing a software-defined storage system.

Chapter 6, Highly Effective Hyper-V Design, will help you to choose a design for your Hyper-V infrastructure depending on the performance you want and the budget you have.

Chapter 7, Hyper-V Performance Tuning, will help you to reach the performance you expect.

Chapter 8, Management with System Center and Azure, introduces System Center and Microsoft Azure features which work well with Hyper-V because Microsoft has a big ecosystem that can interact with Hyper-V.

Chapter 9, Migration to Hyper-V 2016, will help you to achieve the migration if you are still in Windows Server 2012 R2 or VMware and you want to migrate to Hyper-V 2016.

What you need for this book

This book describes the best practices about Hyper-V included in Windows Server 2016. So all the screenshots, PowerShell cmdlets, and XML files have been tested on this Windows Server version. To follow the indication of this book you need Windows Server 2016.

Moreover, some chapters describe System Center and some features provided by Microsoft Azure. To follow all chapters, you need an Azure subscription and System Center 2016.

Other tools that are introduced are free. So you can easily download them from the Internet.

Who this book is for

If you are working with Hyper-V and want to optimize its performance and effectiveness, this book is for you. This book will help you close the gap between the Hyper-V lab and production environments.

Conventions

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Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: Code words in text are shown as follows: The unattended setup uses configurations saved in a precreated unattended.xml file.

A PowerShell cmdlet is set as follows:

New-VM -Name VM01 -Generation 2

An XML file is set as follows:

1.0 encoding=UTF-8?>

WinPE processorArchitecture=amd64 publicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35 language=neutral versionScope=nonSxS xmlns:wcm=http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/Sta

te xmlns:xsi=http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

 

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  en-US

  en-US

  en-US

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Note

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Tip

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