General best practices for Hyper-V (not specific to PowerVault ME5 storage) are discussed in great detail in Microsoft documentation.
For example, go to docs.microsoft.com and search on Hyper-V to view a list of technical documentation including the following:
For additional information about general best practices and tuning steps for Hyper-V, see the Microsoft Windows Server Documentation library.
To avoid redundancy, the general guidance in the documentation above 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 the workload before deploying it on Hyper-V.
- Ensure the solution is adequately sized 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 hosts, volumes, initiators, and so on. 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 may 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 (for small deployments) or System Center Virtual Machine Manager (for large deployments) to centrally manage hosts and clusters.
- Ensure that all hosts and VMs are updated regularly.
- Provide adequate malware protection.
- Ensure that essential data is protected with backups that meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
- Snapshots and replication are integral to a data protection strategy with PowerVault.
- Minimize or disable unnecessary hardware devices and services to free up host resources for VMs. This action also helps to reduce power consumption.
- Schedule tasks such as periodic maintenance, backups, malware scans, and updates to run after hours. Stagger start times if maintenance operations overlap and are resource-intensive.
- Tune application workloads according to vendor recommendations to reduce or eliminate unnecessary processes or activity.
- Use PowerShell or other scripting tools to automate step-intensive, repeatable tasks to ensure consistency and avoid mistakes due to human error. This practice can also help reduce administration time.
- PowerVault offers CLI and REST API support for additional management and scripting functionality.
- Enable monitoring and alerting features to identify and resolve issues quickly.
- Configure ME5 email alerts.
- Enable the Dell SupportAssist feature in ME5 to automatically contact support resources when events such as a drive failure occur.