Hyper-V recommendations?

Because the overhead to do 2 processors negates what you can get out of it

The processor is shared anyway between VM & host OS anyway, so believe me, it makes no sense to use 2 in VM

sebus

 

Hey FreeStyler,
Good to see your finally testing out Hyper-V

Reviede and Sebus, have got you well covered. But that won't stop me adding my 2 cents.

Don't run anything on the Server except Hyper-V. Any Features or Roles should be run on the VHDs. Also if your using 'R2' as sebus said using 1 CPU per VHD is best for a couple of reasons.
1. 'R2' shares the CPUs between the Server and VHDs better,
e.g. If 1 CPU is being used by the Sever or VHD1, VHD2 will use another CPU.
2. If the Server and the VHD's are at idle, 'R2' will park the other CPU's/Cores. Saving you money on power usage.

If you need to install the Server again,
Consider using 'Hyper-V Server R2' instead of 'Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V'
The 'Hyper-V Server R2' is meant to be 'headless' it has no GUI or Roles other than Hyper-V and is there for very light weight, saving your resouces. Altho you'll need to install the Hyper-V manager on a Vista/Win7 PC to control it. (This can be a pain ) and RDC to acess the VHD's.
Plus its 'Free' so theres no need for any activation process on the Server.

 

The difference is easy.
Hyper-V server is a standalone product. Its a "console only" W2K8R2 Server with only one role possible on it.
Adminstration of this one is done via remote admin tools on another client-machine.

As for Hardware support, its the exactly same kernel as the one on a "normal" 2K8R2 Server. yes, you can install drivers for unsupported hardware and such, so you are not limited in any way.

mind you, this is a pure virtualisation host, no services on it except hyper-v.

the big plus on the other hand is the small footprint, which leaves a maximum amount of resources for the VMs.

2K8(R2) server with hyper-v on the other hand gives you the benefit of running services other than hyper-v on the host machine itself.

I'd recomment playing around with that one first, then when you are satisfied your virtual machines are doing what you want, save/export them to e.g. an external harddrive, install hyper-v server itself on the host and import the vm's back.

And yes, you would have 2 VM's instead of the one in your current setup. but both of em only require a small amount of resources, so there will be no issues with that.
with the memory you "save" by running 2 vms on hyper-v vs one on s2k8r2 with hyper-v you can easily go further and run a third or even forth vm when and if the need for that arises.

 

Host: R2 with Hyper-V
VM Machines: As long as the application you intend to run on the VMachine isn't resource heavy, you can get away with 512mb ram per VM Machine, But be careful of using multiple VM's at a time. If you don't setup the resources well for what your hardware can support, it will only bog down the system. A well paced hard drive, say 3 ssd's in raid 5 6-8gb memory and a solid cpu can make all the difference.

The advantage of seperate VMachines running on a Hyper-V: If your server gets hacked, say one of the VM Machines, they wont have instant access to the Host or the other VM Machines, but that doesn't mean they couldn't eploint the service on the Host machine, and comprimise the stability of all of the VM Machines.

I'd recommend a standard or console only Hyper v instalation, if you can go through the trouble of making it work, the resources on the host would be minimal, and you should be able to run say 2-3 at the same time, considering they arent running intensive services.