Some Hyper-V help pls

Over Clocker · 23 Feb 2010 at 19:10

Hi guys, we've got a hyper-v setup in our office, but it's quite a bad setup for a number of reasons.

The main one is the host is running a lot of other roles, because it is a domain controller, DNS, DHCP etc etc. I'm just in the middle of setting up another virtual machine, which I will promote as a DC, move roles, and then demote the current DC.

Few questions ... is it ok to share one virtual network card between 3 or 4 virtual machines? I have one physical card for the host, and one for the virtual machines.

Virtual disks... currently I have all the vhd's on one physical RAID 5 partition. Is that ok, or should I really be using the physical disks features. Also, all the VHDs show in Hyper-V as being under the IDE controller, is this ok, or does it make for slow disk access?

Thanks,

Mal

GiB · 24 Feb 2010 at 22:19

I would think one nic is fine, not recommended as you could do with some fail over ie another nic, but no reason why it would not work they will just share the card.

Sin_Chase · 25 Feb 2010 at 00:45

Direct Access to disks should really only be used in circumstances that require it in my mind. Much easier to contain everything inside the VHD. RAID-5 is fault tolerant, while not the best setup for performance you could be doing a lot worse.

Over Clocker · 25 Feb 2010 at 07:50

Thanks a lot guys. I'm on my way to getting this sorted. I'm bringing up another DC today, 2008 R2, and will then move roles over. Question is, Host is 2008 RTM, guest is 2008 R2, and for some reason, on the R2 system, I am not getting any network access on the controller on the guests. I can ping the host, and get an IPv6 reply, but nothing else, no IPv4 address. I cannot ping the guests. Guests on 2008 RTM are all working fine though.

Any ideas?!

Lanz · 25 Feb 2010 at 08:21

I share about 10 guests per NIC so 4 should be fine. I'll use a new NIC if I want to host say a DMZ guest or one on another VLAN.

As for your network acess, sometimes I find the guests dont pick up their external virtual network and you have to disable/enable the virtual NIC to get it working.

Over Clocker · 25 Feb 2010 at 09:18

Hi Lanz,

Many thanks, that worked fine!

Saundie · 25 Feb 2010 at 13:36

If you install the Hyper-V Integration Services on the virtual DC, make sure you disable the Time Synchronization service and configure the virtual DC to use an NTP server. If, for whatever reason, the host's system clock is changed then the VM will be forced to take the incorrect time from the host - this can have ruinous effects on your domain!