After successfully establishing some performance baselines for Hyper-V, it's important to create regular benchmarks of your Hyper-V environment. Use MAP or SCOM to monitor the performance of the common performance counters, but I recommend that you use an overall benchmark from time to time to make sure that the performance on the application level is consistent.

Which type of benchmark you use depends on your workload. I highly recommend a standardized benchmark that utilizes a database and an application tier. The primary benchmark for this is the SAP SD benchmark. If you are a SAP customer, this is the way to go. You can find a Microsoft blog post about a SAP Hyper-V reference benchmark at http://bit.ly/1nMVSQw.

If you do not use SAP or another ERP system with this type of benchmark, you can use other available benchmarks. I highly recommend PassMark Performance Test, which is available for a 30-day trial at http://bit.ly/UFd2Ff, because it offers benchmarks that utilize...