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I run a small web hosting company and we are in the process of replacing all of our old physical servers (HP Gen4/5) with brand new hardware (HP Gen9 w/ Dual E5-2650v3's, 128G ram, 6x300G 15k 12G SAS3 drives in Raid10). We have no experience with virtualization and we are considering running Windows Server 2012 Standard with the Hyper-v role as a host for 1 or 2 Windows Server 2012 Standard guests on each machine. We do not have any SANs, Active Directory, domain controllers, or terminal services (beyond the included administration accounts). It's currently a pretty simple set-up with a couple web servers, a couple of database servers, a couple of back end processing machines, and 5 support machines.

Anyone out there using Server 2012 Standard with the Hyper-V role in an environment of this small scale? We are concerned about stability and reliability of using Hyper-v VS all physical machines.

Does using the Host OS as a server (web server for example) cause performance problems on the guest server (or vice versa)?

We are considering running small guest OS instances to replace some of the support machines but we do not want to impact the stability and reliability of the host machines.

Suggestions?

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  • You should strongly consider using the Server Core install instead of a full desktop install. Hyper-V, and Windows in general is a bit more difficult to remotely manage without an Domain.
    – Zoredache
    Oct 30, 2014 at 18:00
  • Virtualize all the things!
    – Evan Anderson
    Oct 30, 2014 at 18:29

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Beefy hardware! There's nothing necessarily wrong with this setup, though. I use similar configurations on the VMware side, but can't add any Hyper-V specific information to this. These days, you're safe virtualizing everything.

I'm curious about the consolidation ratio. Why only run 1-2 systems (VMs) on each host? You should be able to achieve more than that. One of the other goals of virtualization is being able to make more efficient use of the hardware. In general, you will exhaust RAM resources far sooner than CPU... So coming from the older hardware you're retiring, you have plenty of resources available.

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    After I posted this I posed the licensing question to microsoft SPLA and they told me using the host OS to do anything other than Hyper-V was not allowed even if we paid for licenses for it. I would have to just run it as a hypervisor and run everything off of VMs.
    – Bob
    Nov 6, 2014 at 17:09
  • For the consolidation ratio, we run applications that are very memory and disk intensive so given the resources available on each physical server and a projected expansion of hosting over the life of these servers, we will only be able to run 2-3 VMs per box. Most likely we will end up with a box with 2 large VMS for database instances and a small instance for a support server. We will deploy another box with a large VM for a web/application server and 1-2 small instances for support servers and a 3rd box with a large instance for backend processing and 1-2 small instances for support servers.
    – Bob
    Nov 6, 2014 at 17:14

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