Safety Net

More Performance for the LUN

To increase the performance of a CSV LUN, it is advisable to configure the CSV cache using PowerShell. The CSV cache increases the performance of CSV by reserving RAM as a write-through cache for reading unbuffered I/O transactions only. A Microsoft blog [2] has more information on the CSV cache.

Now create a VM in the failover cluster and assign an IP address before testing to see whether the failover cluster really is redundant, including:

1. Testing network card failures and LBFO functionality.

2. Testing whether another network card assumes this role in case the heartbeat connection fails.

3. Testing failure of the storage host bus adapter and continuous availability of the storage LUN.

4. Testing failure of individual cluster nodes by deliberately powering down and looking to see whether the resources come online correctly on another cluster node.

5. Testing the redundancy of the network switch function.

6. Testing for failure of a storage unit in the case of mirrored storage.

Continue the configuration only if all tests complete with positive results. After you have completed the typical failover and failure safety tests, you will next want to check the live migration features. In the Failover Cluster Manager, click on the Roles node, select the VM you want to move and start the live migration from the context menu (Figure 4). If the names of the Hyper-V virtual switches are identical, live migration should complete without any trouble.

Figure 4: VMs can be moved between cluster nodes with (virtually) no interruption.

You can determine whether the correct network is used for live migration by starting the Task Manager, selecting the Live Migration NIC in the Performance tab, and then initiating a migration. The related traffic should be routed via this network adapter.

Manager for VMs

If you are looking to implement a larger Hyper-V environment and need a tool for central administration of all Hyper-V hosts and VMs, check out the Microsoft System Center 2016 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), which supports the following activities:

• Management of a virtualized data center with all Hyper-V hosts and failover clusters.
• Ability to administer VMware servers that are managed with vCenter.
• Fabric and storage management for configuring storage devices and SMB shares on file servers.
• VM management.
• Network management of all virtual and logical switches.
• Update and compliance management via WSUS.
• Library management for provisioning ISO files, VM templates, guest operating system profiles, and more.
• Integration with System Center Operations Manager.
• Resource optimization (dynamic optimization and power optimization).
• Bare metal provisioning of Hyper-V hosts and Scale-Out File Servers (SOFS).

Conclusions

In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has completely revamped Hyper-V's feature set, adding many new features that facilitate the deployment of VMs locally and in the cloud, providing greater security and performance, and making the integration of Hyper-V even more useful in corporate environments. In the case of failover clusters, Microsoft has reloaded and bought Hyper-V new possibilities, helping administrators achieve even greater reliability and better performance.