Book Image

Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

By : Romain Serre, Benedict Berger
Book Image

Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

By: Romain Serre, Benedict Berger

Overview of this book

Hyper-V Server and Windows Server 2016 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. This book will assist you in designing, implementing, and managing highly effective and highly available Hyper-V infrastructures. With an example-oriented approach, this book covers all the different tips and suggestions to configure Hyper-V and provides readers with real-world proven solutions. This book begins by deploying single clusters of High Availability Hyper-V systems including the new Nano Server. This is followed by steps to configure the Hyper-V infrastructure components such as storage and network. It also touches on 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 ensuring your applications are always the best they can be.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Working with virtual disks


There are several configuration options for virtual hard disks, starting from the disks format. Hyper-V supports, currently, the classic VHD format and the newer VHDX format. VHDX disks are preferable in many ways, starting with their increased size, up to 64 TB, over their better performance and reliability options, and to their better management capabilities such as resizing the disks both ways. The only reason to use VHD files now is their backwards compatibility with Hyper-V versions prior to 2012. If you don't need this, don't use VHD files. If you are still using VHD files, convert them via PowerShell when in the offline state:

Convert-VHD -Path d:\VM01.vhd 
   -DestinationPath d:\VM01.vhdx

After setting the format of the virtual disk, the next decision will be about the type of the virtual disk. Hyper-V supports three types of virtual hard disks:

  • Fixed

  • Dynamic

  • Differencing

Fixed disks allocate their maximum storage at creation time. The size of a fixed...