Vista - Hyper V best practices and questions

I recently did my first Hyper-V installation that runs four production
virtual machines. I was curious about two things.

1.) What is the best way to backup your Hyper-V images? I take weekly
snapshots, but I'm assuming that does not take the place of normal backups.
How does Microsoft recommend backing up?

2.) are there any best practices around the number of Hyper-V images that
should be running on a single server host that has 32 GB of RAM?

3.) Also, are there any apps (like Exchange) that should now be virtualized
with Hyper-V? Any that Microsoft does not support?

Easy ones... :-)

1. Use Windows Server Backup from the parent partition. You must register
the MSFT Hyper-V VSS Writer to enable this functionality. More here:

How to back up Hyper-V virtual machines from the parent partition on a
Windows Server 2008-based computer by using Windows Server Backup
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b/958662/en-us


2. No best practices per se, but treat your VMs no differently than you
would your physical systems. Don't inhibit the performance of you VMs by
throttling disk performance by cramming too many VMs onto too few disk
spindles, don't choke off your VM performance by reducing RAM beyond a
reasonable point of performance. Ultimately, remember that you'll get out
of this what you put into it. :-)


3. Many (but not all) MSFT server applications now support Hyper-V /
Virtualization. Check the specific applications for more details. Here's a
great KB article as a starting point:

Microsoft server software and supported virtualization environments
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957006

Hope this helps,
--Ryan

--
Ryan Sokolowski
MVP - Clustering
MCT, MCITP x3, MCTS x8, MCSE x2, CCNA, CCDA, BCFP


"Tim" <tjc7546@xxxxxx> wrote in message
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