Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

Benedict Berger, Romain Serre

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781785883392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: System Administration
• Index: Computer Science

Harness the power of Hyper-V 2016 to build high-performance infrastructures that suit your needs

About This Book

• Design and build a reliable and efficient Hyper-V infrastructure.
• Fine-tune your Hyper-V performance by adopting network and storage best practices.
• Manage, monitor, and protect your workloads with System Center and Microsoft Azure.

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.

What You Will Learn

• Automate and accelerate the deployment of Hyper-V host and nano servers
• Create high availability solutions using failover clustering
• Design redundant solutions with Hyper-V Replica
• Protect your workloads by making a backup or learning disaster recovery
• Use the best practices of network and storage
• Master the performance and scalability of storage virtualization
• Migrate your existing virtualization workloads to Hyper-V2016
• Manage your Hyper-V stack with System Center and Azure
• Bridge the gap between the Hyper-V lab and production environment

In Detail

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.

Style and approach

This book covers Hyper-V best practices in a step-by-step manner with clear and concise examples.

Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

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Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

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Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: November 2014

Second edition: October 2016

Production reference: 1251016

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78588-339-2

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Credits

Authors Benedict Berger Romain Serre	Copy Editor Tom Jacob
Reviewer Romeo Mlinar	Project Coordinator Kinjal Bari
Commissioning Editor Kartikey Pandey	Proofreader Safis Editing
Acquisition Editors Juned Patel Mansi Sanghavi	Indexer Pratik Shirodkar
Content Development Editor Mehvash Fatima	Graphics Kirk D'Penha
Technical Editor Devesh Chugh	Production Coordinator Deepika Naik

About the Authors

Benedict Berger was the author of the first edition of this book (Hyper-V Best Practices by Packt Publishing). He works as a technology solutions professional at Microsoft. He blogs on the German Virtualization Blog (http://blogs.technet.com/b/germanvirtualizationblog/) and on his personal blog (http://blog.benedict-berger.de).

Romain Serre works in Lyon as a senior consultant. He is focused on Microsoft Technology, especially on Hyper-V, System Center, Storage, networking, and Cloud OS technology such as Microsoft Azure or Azure Stack. He is an MVP and a certified Microsoft Certified Solution Expert (MCSE Server Infrastructure and Private Cloud), on Hyper-V and on Microsoft Azure (implementing a Microsoft Azure solution). He blogs at http://www.tech-coffee.net.

About the Reviewer

Romeo Mlinar has been working as the head of the IT department at an IT company in Zagreb, Croatia. Professionally, he is connected with computer technology for more than a decade. He is passionately devoted to Microsoft products and technology, such as, System Center, Team Foundation Server, planning and design of Active Directory, as well as Windows Server services, devoting special attention to virtualization (Hyper-V), which is his recent preoccupation. He holds a large number of Microsoft industrial certifications, such as MCSA, MCSE, MCDST, MCTS, MCDBA, MCITP, MCS: Server Virtualization, MCSE: Private Cloud, MCSE: Server Infrastructure, and so on. Since 2012, he is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Cloud and Datacenter Management [Hyper-V]. He is a regular speaker at various IT conferences regionally and abroad. Also, he is an IT Pro User Group Zagreb lead. He spends his free time with people from the IT world, acquiring new knowledge, eagerly sharing it with others, while at the same time enjoying his life with his family. He blogs at http://blog.mlinar.biz/.

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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.

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Table of contents

• Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices