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

NTFS versus Resilient File System (ReFS)


Before talking about Storage Spaces, I'd like to discuss ReFS. Currently Hyper-V supports two filesystems, the classic NTFS, and the more recent Resilient File System (ReFS). Before Windows Server 2016, I recommended that you use NTFS, because ReFS had a lack of some key capabilities and most backup applications have problems with it. Now in Windows Server 2016, Microsoft brings a lot of new features in ReFSv2 as the Accelerated VHDX Operations. The capability enables us to accelerate operations during the following scenarios:

  • Creating and extending a virtual hard disk

  • Merging checkpoints

  • Backups, which are based on production checkpoints (we will discuss production checkpoints later in this chapter)

When you extended a VHD(X) located in an NTFS partition, the system was written by zeroing out the new block. In ReFS, the new blocks are metadata instead. Thanks to ReFS, now you just need between 1 to 5 seconds to create a big VHDX instead of many minutes...