Top performance and capacity tips for Hyper-V

My blog series will look at the changes in Windows/Hyper-V 2012 - what that means from the perspective of the business and managing the capacity and concentrates on the following areas:

 

·         Technology recap

·         Updates to the functionality

·         Comparison between VMware and Hyper-V

·         Metrics and Monitoring

·         Top tips for managing Hyper-V capacity

Technology recap

What is Hyper-V?

Even though Hyper-V has been out there for some time it’s still not widely adopted.  It’s as similar in design as Xen; it’s still classed as a type 1 hypervisor, but has a managing partition rather than Vmware which has multiple guests running on a hypervisor.

 It was first released in June 2008 and the latest versions are available by enabling a role within Windows 2012 or via the core version.  The key elements are:

 

•         The hypervisor (around 100k in size)

•         Parent or root partition (the first and controlling guest)

•         Child partitions

•         Two versions –Full and server core

 

The main difference between the two versions is the available functionality.  The core version purely allows for Hyper-V, whereas the full Windows 2012 allows for all of the usual windows roles to be enabled e.g. IIS, AD, FTP etc

This is an architecture diagram from MSDN which gives you an idea of how the architecture hangs together.

 

 

On the left you can see the root partition which effectively manages the child partition and allows you to create them.

The key differentiator here is the enlightened and unenlightened child partitions, when a partition is enlightened it enables you to use ‘VMware type’ tools and provides better ‘all round’ performance.

You will need to bear in mind that the child partitions communicate to the hyper visor via the root partition from the I/O perspective, so if the root partition is very busy performance and capacity may be impacted.

 

On Friday I'll be looking at the updates to functionality.

In the meantime why not join our community and get free access to our papers,podcasts and downloads http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/index.html

 

Rob Ford
Principal Consultant