QLogic 2600 Series Hyper-V Virtual Server Engine - Manual (Page 3)

Best Practices in Hyper-V
No hardware resource is more important to overall performance
than memory. Plan to ensure each VM has the memory it needs,
but without wasting memory in the process.
Memory
Start with Planning
When planning a Hyper-V installation, it is important to take into account the new capabilities of Hyper-V in
Windows Server 2012. Windows Server 2012 has added significantly to the scalability of Hyper-V. For data
centers virtualizing Tier-1 applications, the critical scalability enhancement is the ability to have up to 1TB of
memory and 64 virtual CPU cores per VM. This will ensure almost all Tier-1 applications should perform well
in a Microsoft Hyper-V environment.
However, these new capabilities also bring complexities, and with them the need to plan new data center
architectures. This not only includes planning the deployment for today’s needs, but also thoroughly
investigating evolution strategies for applications before bolting down racks and filling them with servers.
 Planning which applications are going to run on your virtualized servers is the first step in understanding
your needs.
 From there, it is critical to define server integration points with existing resources (likely core switching
and storage resources), and how these will be affected by the evolution of existing resources.
 After that, planning your approach to Live Migration and capacity growth over the lifetime of your new
infrastructure will help you scope internal I/O requirements appropriately.
Finally, determining whether to utilize converged networks or not, and what I/O performance you need, will
enable you to intelligently discuss your I/O and networking options with your SAN/LAN equipment providers.
These steps will help you ensure success when virtualizing your Tier-1 applications.
To fully optimize virtualized data centers, servers need maximum I/O capacity to support high input/output
operation rates and high bandwidth applications. Increased bandwidth is also needed for server
virtualization, which aggregates I/O from multiple virtual machines (VMs) onto the host’s data path. This
next-generation combination takes full advantage of new features that are described in detail in this planning
guide. Read on to discover how QLogic can increase your infrastructure ROI and overall competitiveness.