I find myself using Hyper-V for work more and more for our customers so I decided I would put a build in place at my home as I find breaking and fixing my own setup without fear of hurting the production of a customer helps me to learn the most in these kind of situations. With that being said I have put a server in place and setup VMs but I am now looking for optimization and best practices for my specific situation which tends to be a common one among my customers.
My Setup:
Server 2012 R2 - Datacenter (Host) - Running HV - sharing a very large raid 6
Server 2012 R2 - Standard (DC VM) - DNS, DHCP, AD etc.
Server 2012 R2 - Standard (Cloud Server) This is basically my desktop which I use for everyday tasks browsing, email, and productivity work etc.
My understanding of HV is getting better however, I must admit that I am very much a novice and what I have learned is purely trial and error and what I have learned on the web. I have spent hours scouring for information but feel my setup could be optimized. I wanted all the VMs to have internet access so I have three NICs (one for each VM and the host) probably overkill. My reading has brought me to believe the only way a VM can have internet access is if it is setup as external meaning one VM per NIC. If this is not the case I would love to hear the real difference in External, private, and internal. My understanding is private can only see other VMs, internal can only see machines on the private lan, and external can access the web.
My question:
My RDP sessions tend to disconnect for a short period of time when when the NIC traffic rises. For example, I start an FTP transfer at about 50 Mb/s, I can expect when I do this that I will disconnect from the RDP sessions for about 30 secs and reconnect. This is true for both VMs but not for the host machine. I feel it may perhaps be due to either the NIC driver or the advanced settings on the NIC as I have not really changed their default settings and perhaps need to be adjusted for use with a VM. I have read about turning off tcp offloading and then read to leave it on so I am a bit confused here. I would love to get a definitive answer on NIC settings for a VM.
Lastly, I have the host and both VMs on a single SSD. I started with the VMs on a standard disk of their own but the performance was poor and all seemed to work better when I moved them to the SSD. I know it is best practice to have them on their own disk but I imagine this is assuming the performance of the disks are all the same. As said, the VMs perform much better on the SSD with the host since I do not have another SSD of sufficient size to move them to. Could the IO be causing my disconnects? I would imagine though the SSD is faster then whatever my internet is bringing in so I cannot imagine this would cause the problem.
I appreciate anyone's time in pointing me in the right directions.
EJ