42 Best Practices for Balanced Hyper-V Systems

by Eric Siron

Last year, Nirmal Sharma wrote a fantastic article on this blog titled 23 Best Practices to improve Hyper-V and VM Performance.

This sparked up a very lively discussion in the comments section; some were very strongly in favour of some items, some very strongly opposed to others. What I think was perhaps missed in some of these comments was that, as Nirmal stated in the title, his list was specifically “to improve Hyper-V and VM performance.” If squeezing every last drop of horsepower out of your Hyper-V host is your goal, then it’s pretty hard to find any serious flaws with his list.

“Just because a Group can be brought to consensus, does not make them right. Assess the Risks of being wrong before proceeding on their say so” — guy w wallace (@guywwallace) February 27, 2015

As you probably know, or can at least guess, I’m not the biggest fan of “best practices” lists. As I’ve said many times in the past, I think far too many administrators have an unhealthy obsession with performance and, as a result, build very wasteful environments. So, what I’d like to do with my “best practices” list is shift the goal. That particular goal is in my title as Nirmal’s was, but I’m also going to add it to the very first entry in this best practices list:

Read more