Preface
Today we virtualize datacenters to gain flexibility, scalability, high-end performance, and ease of management. Moreover, virtualization has brought a high level of consolidation. This enables us to reduce the footprint of the datacenter and save power. For some years, we have wanted to manage our datacenter using the Cloud model. We wanted to create server quickly, improve the performance of this machine on the fly, and delete it when we don't need it anymore.
All of this can be done, thanks to hypervisor. There are several hypervisors such as VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, or Microsoft Hyper-V. Because this book is called Hyper-V Best Practices, we will focus on Hyper-V.
Microsoft has released a major Windows Server version toward the end of 2016. This book focusses on Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016. A lot of new features have been provided in this new version but several rules can be applied to Hyper-V in a previous release.
This book is not intended to explain you all feature mechanisms included in Hyper-V. To follow this book, some knowledge of Hyper-V is required. However, because Hyper-V doesn't work alone, you also need to know about Failover Cluster, Active Directory, storage, and network.
Fasten your seat belts and welcome to this Hyper-V journey.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Accelerating Hyper-V Deployment, gives you some tips to automate Hyper-V and VM deployment, because, in a huge environment, you may want to automate some tasks to limit human errors and to save time.
Chapter 2, Deploying Highly Available Hyper-V Clusters, teaches you how to deploy a Hyper-V cluster and how to leverage it to keep your application working, because, in production, you usually want high availability to keep the application working even in cases of incidents.
Chapter 3, Backup and Disaster Recovery, describes how to leverage Windows Server 2016 and Microsoft Azure to back up your workloads and to failover in another room in case of a disaster because companies want to always back up their workloads and make a Disaster Recovery Plan in case a datacenter is out of order.
Chapter 4, Storage Best Practices, introduces some best practices to leverage the best of your underlying storage system because the storage is a significant piece in a virtual environment. Without good storage, you can expect poor performance.
Chapter 5, Network Best Practices, describes some best practices about the network and Hyper-V, because, similar to the storage, the network is a masterpiece for your virtual environment, especially when implementing a software-defined storage system.
Chapter 6, Highly Effective Hyper-V Design, will help you to choose a design for your Hyper-V infrastructure depending on the performance you want and the budget you have.
Chapter 7, Hyper-V Performance Tuning, will help you to reach the performance you expect.
Chapter 8, Management with System Center and Azure, introduces System Center and Microsoft Azure features which work well with Hyper-V because Microsoft has a big ecosystem that can interact with Hyper-V.
Chapter 9, Migration to Hyper-V 2016, will help you to achieve the migration if you are still in Windows Server 2012 R2 or VMware and you want to migrate to Hyper-V 2016.
What you need for this book
This book describes the best practices about Hyper-V included in Windows Server 2016. So all the screenshots, PowerShell cmdlets, and XML files have been tested on this Windows Server version. To follow the indication of this book you need Windows Server 2016.
Moreover, some chapters describe System Center and some features provided by Microsoft Azure. To follow all chapters, you need an Azure subscription and System Center 2016.
Other tools that are introduced are free. So you can easily download them from the Internet.
Who this book is for
If you are working with Hyper-V and want to optimize its performance and effectiveness, this book is for you. This book will help you close the gap between the Hyper-V lab and production environments.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: Code words in text are shown as follows: "The unattended setup uses configurations saved in a precreated unattended.xml file."
A PowerShell cmdlet is set as follows:
New-VM -Name VM01 -Generation 2
An XML file is set as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<component name="Microsoft-Windows-International-Core-
WinPE" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/Sta
te" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<SetupUILanguage>
<UILanguage>en-US</UILanguage>
</SetupUILanguage>
<InputLocale>en-US</InputLocale>
<UILanguage>en-US</UILanguage>
<SystemLocale>en-US</SystemLocale>
<UserLocale>en-US</UserLocale>
</component>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Start the setup of the Windows ADK you downloaded earlier. At the setup prompt, select only Deployment Tools".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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