Test Layout

I do a lot of work with Hyper-V virtual machines in a test environment. My Hyper-V host is a white box kludged together cheaply, but with reasonable hardware. The VMs that are used for Microsoft courses use base drives for the core OS and then differencing drives for each individual VM. The bouncing back and forth between the base drive and the differencing drive tends to drag down performance. In addition, I often use snapshots to give me a backout point when developing labs. Which reduces performance even more. I've got the storage system setup as four 7200 RPM SATA drives in a RAID 10 array using the Intel Storage Technology enterprise that is built into the motherboard. This gives far better performance than a single drive, but still not enough when I'm running many VMs. Storage speed is the bottle neck in this system. Today I bought a Kingston 240 GB HyperX SSD drive to improve performance. Since the drive is not very large, I though I'd start by moving only the base d...

I work with Hyper-V a lot for Microsoft training and we've starting to use it as our standard virtualization platform for clients. I've seen a lot of improvements in it since it was first introduced and honestly think that for smaller organizations it's easier to work with than VMware. For larger organizations, I think it's a contender. One of the biggest impediments to implementation is knowledge. Microsoft is making online training for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2013 R2 available for free. They're also kicking in a certification exam. Check it out: http://www.virtualizationsquared.com/