See Microsoft documentation for general Hyper-V settings and best practices that are not specific to PowerStore.
Go to docs.microsoft.com and search for Hyper-V to view a list of technical documentation, which includes:
For more information about general best practices and tuning steps for Hyper-V, see the Microsoft Windows Server Documentation library.
Follow the general configuration guidance found in Microsoft documentation to configure your Hyper-V environment. To avoid redundancy, most general configuration guidance is not duplicated here. This document assumes that administrators will deploy and tune Hyper-V in accordance with established Microsoft best practices.
General best practices that are common with any Hyper-V deployment include the following recommendations:
- Understand the I/O requirements of a Hyper-V workload before deploying the workload on PowerStore.
- Size the solution adequately end-to-end to avoid bottlenecks.
- Allow headroom for expansion that factors in anticipated growth.
- Keep the design simple to ease administrative overhead.
- Adopt a standard naming convention for objects such as hosts, volumes, and initiators. Consistent and intuitive naming makes administration easier.
- Configure all production hosts to use at least two data paths (MPIO) to eliminate single points of failure.
- Use of single-path I/O might be acceptable in test or development environments that are not business critical.
- Use Windows Server Core to minimize the attack surface of a server and reduce administrative overhead.
- Use Windows Admin Center to centrally manage hosts and clusters.
- Update all hosts and VMs regularly.
- Provide adequate malware protection.
- Protect essential data with backups that meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
- Minimize or disable unnecessary hardware devices and services to free up host resources for VMs. This action will help reduce power consumption.
- Schedule tasks such as periodic maintenance, backups, malware scans, and updates to run after hours.
- Stagger start times if resource-intensive maintenance operations overlap.
- Follow vendor recommendations to optimize the settings for an application or workload to reduce or eliminate unnecessary processes or activity.
- Use PowerShell or other scripting tools to automate step-intensive, repeatable tasks. PowerStore CLI and REST API provide additional management and scripting functionality.
- Ensure consistency.
- Avoid mistakes due to human error.
- Reduce administrative overhead.
- Enable monitoring and alerting features to identify and resolve issues quickly.
- Configure email alerts.
- Enable Dell SupportAssist in PowerStore to automatically contact support resources when events such as a disk failure occur.