Hyper V Performance Tuning

Here's some good steps to follow when trying to tune your Hyper V deployment. These steps were published on Jason Conger's Virtualisationadmin Blog:

Hyper-V is pretty easy to set up in Windows Server 2008 R2 - just enable the Hyper-V role and start building virtual machines. However, there are a lot of performance tuning measures that can be made to ensure you get optimum performance from your hardware. Paul Schnackenburg has put together a series of articles detailing these performance tuning techniques. Paul’s articles include detailed analysis of the following:

• Virtual processors - According to Microsoft as a general rule of thumb it’s best to have four virtual processors per logical processor in the system, maximum is eight. But the question of course is how can you find out the ratio on your hosts?
• Memory, Storage, and Networking - Optimizing memory for VMs is a challenge in Hyper-V of today as the memory you assign to each VM is fixed whether the VM actually uses it or not. The good news it’s going to become a whole lot easier when Microsoft releases SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Dynamic Memory comes into play.
• Tuning Tips and Tricks - integration components, guest OS, Hyper-V manager, Services, Host OS, Background CPU activity, network configuration.
• Monitoring Hyper-V performance - The first rule is don’t ever measure performance of a VM from within a VM. Most sys admins first reaction to performance complaints will be to have a look in Task Manager. Unfortunately that doesn’t work in a VM because it can only see its little keyhole view of the world.