My company is moving heavily into virtualization. We have about 50 HW servers and 2 HyperV 2008 single hosts. I just built a pretty beefy Hyper-V 2012 clustered server and connected it to a brand new SAN.
I've read several articles before building the system to ensure that i follow those best practices, like this one.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2013/03/10/windows-server-2012-hyper-v-best-practices-in-easy-checklist-form.aspx
The new system is running great. It has a dedicated NIC for live migrations, which has been tested.
My questions are really about resource usage. Determining how many virtual machines to put on one physical NIC, and how many virtual processors to give a virtual machine. I found an article that described mathematically what my limits are for a single virtual server. My server has 24 cores with 48 logical processors and 512 GB RAM.
What i'm not sure of is how many virtual processors I should give a machine. What I'm doing currently is starting small and just visually rating performance. If the machine seems slow i turn it off and give it two more processors. Does this sound like a good method?
Also, does anyone know how processor affinity work for HyperV. I would assume that HyperV balances threads across all cores. Or does it load up cores first them move to others.
Then there are the physical NICS. The back end ISCSI nics for the SAn are 10G and isolated and HyperV isn't allowed to use them. The front end NICS for the virtual servers are 1G. I'm watching them for load, but they seem to be no where near saturated. How many virts should I put on a single NIC? Is it just based on saturation or are there other considerations?
Thanks,