Hyper-V Best Practices

Book description

Equip yourselves with the real-world configurations and best practices of Hyper-V to take full advantage of its virtualization capabilities

In Detail

Hyper-V Server and Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V provide best in class virtualization capabilities. Hyper-V is a Windows-based, very cost-effective virtualization solution with easy-to-use and well-known administrative consoles.

With an example-oriented approach, this book covers all the different guides and suggestions to configure Hyper-V and provides readers with real-world proven solutions. After applying the concepts shown in this book, your Hyper-V setup will run on a stable and validated platform.

The book begins with setting up single and multiple High Availability systems. It then takes you through all the typical infrastructure components such as storage and network, and its necessary processes such as backup and disaster recovery for optimal configuration. The book does not only show you what to do and how to plan the different scenarios, but it also provides in-depth configuration options. These scalable and automated configurations are then optimized via performance tuning and central management.

What You Will Learn

  • Install Hyper-V and virtual machines automated through PowerShell
  • Create High Availability solutions with failover clustering
  • Protect from disasters with Hyper-V Replica
  • Utilize the performance and scalability of storage virtualization
  • Build a flexible network infrastructure without physical boundaries
  • Design performance measurement and tuning action plans
  • Manage your Hyper-V stack with System Center
  • Move existing virtualization workloads to Hyper-V

Table of contents

  1. Hyper-V Best Practices
    1. Table of Contents
    2. Hyper-V Best Practices
    3. Credits
    4. About the Author
    5. Acknowledgments
    6. About the Reviewers
    7. www.PacktPub.com
      1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why subscribe?
        2. Free access for Packt account holders
        3. Instant updates on new Packt books
    8. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Downloading the example code
        2. Errata
        3. Piracy
        4. Questions
    9. 1. Accelerate Hyper-V Deployment
      1. Why Hyper-V projects fail
      2. Planning your environment
      3. Preparing your host systems
      4. Creating unattended installation files
      5. Adding basic components
      6. Which edition to install
      7. To GUI or not to GUI
      8. Hyper-V hosts in Active Directory domains
      9. Activating Hyper-V features
      10. Post-installation tasks
      11. Antivirus on a Hyper-V host
      12. Setting the Pagefile
      13. Creating virtual machines
      14. Summary
    10. 2. High Availability Scenarios
      1. Preparing for High Availability
        1. Planning a HA environment
        2. Overview of the Failover Cluster
        3. Failover Cluster prerequirements
          1. Hardware
          2. The network design
          3. Storage design
          4. Server and software requirements
        4. Implementing Failover Clusters
        5. Quorum configuration
        6. Live Migration configuration
        7. Guest clustering
          1. Network design for a guest cluster
          2. Storage design for a guest cluster
          3. Cluster-Aware Updating
      2. Summary
    11. 3. Backup and Disaster Recovery
      1. Protecting a Hyper-V environment
      2. Hyper-V Replica
        1. Enabling Hyper-V Replica
          1. Preparing the first host
          2. Preparing additional hosts
          3. Activate VM replication
          4. Monitoring Hyper-V Replica
          5. Hyper-V Replica testing and failover
      3. Azure Site Recovery
        1. Replica workloads
      4. Backup of virtual machines
      5. Summary
    12. 4. Storage Best Practices
      1. Storage overview
      2. SANs versus SOFS
      3. Storage Spaces and tiering
        1. Virtual disks
          1. Checkpoints
      4. Multipath I/O
      5. Cluster Shared Volumes
      6. Data deduplication
      7. Storage Quality of Service
      8. NTFS versus Resilient File System
      9. The iSCSI target
      10. Summary
    13. 5. Network Best Practices
      1. Networking overview
        1. The Virtual Switch
          1. The external vSwitch
          2. The internal vSwitch
          3. The private vSwitch
        2. The virtual interface
      2. NIC Teaming
      3. Converged networking
      4. Storage network
      5. SMB Direct
      6. Advanced networking options
      7. IPAM
      8. Summary
    14. 6. Hyper-V Performance Tuning
      1. Measuring performance
        1. The performance counter
          1. Disk performance
          2. Memory performance
          3. Network performance
          4. Processor performance
      2. Performance tuning
        1. Hyper-V power options and green IT
        2. Hardware-tuning options
          1. Network-hardware-tuning options
            1. Receive Side Scaling (RSS)
            2. Single Root IO Virtualization
            3. Other offload capabilities
            4. Using IPv6 with Hyper-V
        3. Storage-tuning options
          1. Offloaded Data Transfer
        4. Shutdown-tuning options
          1. Setting the shutdown timeout
      3. Hyper-V benchmarking
      4. Hyper-V for virtual desktops
        1. Using RemoteFX
      5. Summary
    15. 7. Management with System Center
      1. Microsoft System Center
        1. System Center Virtual Machine Manager
          1. Cloud management
        2. System Center App Controller
        3. System Center Operations Manager
        4. System Center Service Manager
        5. System Center Orchestrator
        6. System Center Data Protection Manager
        7. Automatic System Center deployment
      2. Summary
    16. 8. Migration to Hyper-V 2012 R2
      1. Upgrading single Hyper-V hosts
        1. Importing virtual machines
        2. Exporting virtual machines
        3. Cross-version Live Migration
        4. The Copy Cluster Roles Wizard
      2. Migrating VMware virtual machines
        1. System Center VMM
        2. Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter
        3. Microsoft Automation Toolkit
        4. MAT powered by Project Shift
        5. Other V2V scenarios
        6. Physical to Virtual conversions
        7. Virtualizing domain controllers
      3. Summary
    17. Index

Product information

  • Title: Hyper-V Best Practices
  • Author(s): Benedict Berger
  • Release date: November 2014
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781782176091