DARSHANA JAYATHILAKE

(MCT,MCSE)

SYSTEM ENGINEER

DMS ELECTRONICS

darshanajayathilake@gmail.comhttp://darshanaj.wordpress.com

AgendaBest Practices on

• Designing and implementation

• Resource Allocation

• Storage

• Virtual Machines

• Security and Data protection

• Management and Monitoring

Best Practices

• Best practices are guidelines which are used to obtain the most efficient and effective way of completing a task using repeatable and proven procedures

Designing & Implementation

Use Microsoft Certified Hardware http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/

Server Core• It consumes less resource

• Greater Stability

• Reduce attack surface

• Reduced maintenance

Hyper-V host• Do not enable any other server roles in the Hyper-v host

• Do not install any other application on the Hyper-V host

• Windows updates and service packs

• Redundant Power supply, UPS power

• Hyper-V cluster

Change the default locations • Default VM configuration file location

• Default VHD files

Best Practice Analyzer• Scan Hyper-v hosts

• Check the result

• Refer the guidelines

• Configuration changes

• Comply Best Practice analyzer rules

Failover Clustering• proper server sizing for tolerate the failure

• Identical servers with same firmware , Drivers , patches

• Perform cluster validation before configure the cluster

• Correct quorum configuration(Node majority, Disk Majority)

Use only supported guest operating systems• Windows 2003 SP2 – Windows 2012 R2

• Windows XP SP2 – Windows 8.1

• CentOS

• Suse Linux

• RedHat linux

• Debian

• Oracle

Proper Antivirus Configuration• Install only compatible Antivirus guard

• Exclusions for Hyper-V

(https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd283088(WS.10).aspx)

• Folders containing VHD,VDHX files

• Folders containing vm configuration files

• Folders containing snaphosts

• Vmms.exe

• Vmwp.exe

Resource Allocation

Proper virtual processor allocation

• Available no of virtual process per vm is equal to no of cores in physical cpu/s

• 2048 virtual processors per host

• Maximum 64 virtual processor per vm

Guest OS Maximum Number of virtual processor

Win 2012 R2 64

Win 2012 64

Win 2008R2/2008 4

Win 2003 2

Proper virtual processor allocationMaximum VCPU for guest os

Processor allocation • 1:1 allocation for processor intensive servers

• 1:4 or maximum 1:8 VCPU allocation

• Avoid CPU reservation unless actual requirement

• Reserve some CPU capacity for host

• Consider cluster failover threshold

Storage

Multipath I/O for storage access• Redundant physical paths to storage(SAN,NAS)

• Compatible with iSCSI, FC and SAS

• Load balancing and failover

• MPCLAIM.exe

Servers

SAN Switches

Storage

Shared storage-Best practices

• Use more than one LUN for store virtual machines

• Data tier levels and multiple RAID levels

• Use SAS 15K RAID 10 LUNs for VMS with high I/O requirement

• Redundant power,Controllers

Virtual Machines

VHD/VHDX• Use fixed virtual hard disk files

• Configure SCSI controllers for data volumes(Gen 1 virtual machines)

• Avoid store VHD files in system drive

Generation 2 Virtual machines

• Compatible with Win2012R2,Win 2012,Win 8/8.1 64 Bit

• Boot virtual machine from SCSI controller

• Faster than booting from IDE controller(Gen1)

Always install integration services

• Suite of utilities in Microsoft Hyper-V

• Enhance the performance of the VM

• Optimized the drivers

• Linux integrations packs can be download from MS

Physical and Virtual Networking

Physical Network• Ensure NICS have latest firmware and drivers

• Ensure to use multiple NICS and redundant switches , firewall ,etc…

• Labeling of network cables

Redundant network/Multiple NICS• Server 2012 NIC Teaming

• Bandwidth Aggregation

• Traffic Failover

• NICS for management

• NICS for virtual network

• NICS for HB

• NICS for LM

Virtual switches• Avoid creating multiple virtual switches

• Use VLAN tagging for segregate network traffic

• Make sure to use same names of the virtual switches on different hosts

• Use legacy nics only for requirement of PXE boot(Generation 1 vms)

Security & Data Protection

Host Security

• Anti-Malware software

• Securing Live Migration, Storage Migration Traffic using IPSEC

• Hyper-V replica over HTTPS only

• Window updates

• Router Guard, DHCP Guard

Backup and restore• Use Virtualization platform and application awareness backup product(Best suitable one is MS DPM 2012

R2)

• Configure Daily, Weekly ,Monthly backups

• Maintain retention period

• D2D2T backups

• Use vm and application level backups(Exchange , SharePoint ,AD,SQL)

• Configure backup network

• Schedule serial backup jobs on each LUN

• Free space for data restoring process

Snapshots•Delete snapshot once you done configuration, change or Migration

•Snapshot is not a backup

•Take the backup of vm before merge it

•Don’t delete, rename or edit snapshot files(avhd,avdx)

Management & Monitoring

Hyper-v management• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 is the best software

• Add all the Hyper-v Cluster\s, Standalone hosts to the SCVMM

• Maintain library(ISO and VM templates) for deployment

• Integrate with Appcontroller and provide the self service portal for Server owners

Monitoring• MS System Center Operation Manager 2012 R2

• Management packs for Hyper-v, Windows Servers, Failover clustering

• Configure Pro tip(Performance and resource optimization)

Thank you