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Introduction
7 Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series and Microsoft Hyper-V | 3921-BP-WS
the default queue-depth setting works well for most hosts in a SAN environment. However, increasing the
queue depth for a large sequential workload running on a small number of hosts might result in a significant
performance increase, while doing the same for a non-sequential workload running on many hosts might have
the opposite result, degraded performance. One of the purposes of a best-practices document is to call
attention to situations where using a default setting or configuration may not be optimal.
Some common goals of best practices include:
• Minimize complexity and administrative overhead
• Optimize the performance of a workload
• Maximize security
• Ensure resiliency and recoverability
• Maximize return on investment over the life of the hardware
It is important to remember that best practices are baselines that may not be ideal for every environment.
Some notable exceptions include the following:
• In some cases, legacy systems that are performing well and have not reached their life expectancy
may not adhere to current best practices. The best course of action may be to run legacy
configurations until they reach their life expectancy because it is too disruptive or costly to make
changes outside of a normal hardware progression or upgrade cycle. Dell EMC recommends
upgrading to the latest technologies and adopting current best practices at key opportunities such as
when upgrading or replacing infrastructure.
• A common best practices tradeoff is to implement a less-resilient design (to save cost and reduce
complexity) in a test or development environment that is not business critical.
Note: While following the best practices in this document is strongly recommended by Dell EMC, some
recommendations may not apply to all environments. For questions about the applicability of these guidelines
in your environment, contact your Dell EMC representative.
1.4 General best practices for Hyper-V
There are many general best practices for Hyper-V not specific to storage that are not discussed in detail in
this document. See resources such as Microsoft TechNet for guidance on general Hyper-V best practices.
The following provides a high-level summary of some of the most common best practices tuning steps for
Hyper-V:
• Minimize or disable unnecessary hardware devices and services to free up host CPU cycles that can
be used by other VMs (this also helps to reduce power consumption).
• Schedule tasks such as periodic maintenance, backups, malware scans, and patching to run after
hours, and stagger start times when such operations overlap and are CPU or I/O intensive.
• Tune application workloads to reduce or eliminate unnecessary processes or activity.
• Leverage Microsoft PowerShell or other scripting tools to automate step-intensive repeatable tasks to
ensure consistency and avoid human error. This can also reduce administration time.