Maximizing Hyper-V Performance

Reserve the parent partition for Hyper-V -- Do not run other roles or applications in the parent partition. The parent platform should be reserved for managing Hyper-V. Running other applications in it will degrade of the performance of all your VMs

Reserve 1GB for Hyper-V partition – The parent partition needs RAM to manage the various VMs and worker threads. Don’t allocate all of the available RAM to the VMs.

Don’t over allocate your cores – For maximum performance ensure the each VM has a physical core to handle its workload. A rule of thumb for the best VM performance is 1 CPU core per vCPU.

Don’t run Hyper-V Manager all the time – Hyper-V Manager is an application and will take resources form your VMs. Don’t leave it up all the time. It’s better to manage Hyper-V from a networked system.

Use enlighten guest OSes – Enlightened OS can take advantage of higher performance synthetic drivers that use fewer host CPU cycles.

Consider separating the paging file from the boot drive – Separating the I/O of the paging file can help improve VM performance. Use a VHD or VHDX that is sized at 1.5x the VM RAM.

Don’t use checkpoints on production servers – Checkpoints are great for test, lab and help desk systems but they increase I/O requirements which will degrade the performance of production servers.