Tips for Virtual Server 2005

Virtualization is a hot technology, and for goodreason. Today's virtualization products are mature,production-ready, and can be used to solve many problems that businesses face today. Here are 10 tips forusing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 (R2) moreeffectively.

1. Upgrade to Virtual Server 2005 R2—First, upgradeto Virtual Server 2005 R2. Virtual Server 2005 R2offers many new features, including 64-bit host support, support for Windows clustering services, newsupport for popular Linux distributions, fixed hyper-threading, and performance improvements of as much as 100 percent for Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server.

2. Allocate enough memory for your VMs—Memoryis an important factor to consider when creatingnew virtual machines (VMs). When you size a VM,remember it will require at least the same amountof memory as the physical machine plus an additional 32MBfor VM overhead. So, to adequately move a 512MB system toa VM you'd need to allocate 544MB of RAM.

3. Allocate enough memory for the host—Althoughit's vital to allocate enough memory for your VMs,it's even more important that you reserve adequatememory for the host. If the host runs out of memoryand begins paging, the performance of all the VMs will suffer. 512MB should be considered the minimum amountnecessary for the host. Running Virtual Server 2005 R2 on anx64 platform boosts the available memory as the supportedsystem memory jumps from a 4GB maximum on the 32-bitplatform to 1TB on the x64 platform.

4. Install Virtual Machine Additions—Microsoft Virtual Machine Additions is a component for improving VM performance and usability. Virtual MachineAdditions provides high-performance mouse andvideo support by moving some important VM functionsinto the system kernel and enables optional host time synchronization.

5. Create your VHDs on a separate disk—VMs mustshare host resources, and the hard disk resourcegreatly affects performance. You'll reduce systemresource contention and improve overall performance by creating Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) on separatedisk drives and even separating VM controllers from thedrives and controllers that the host OS uses.

6. Use differencing disks to save disk space—You'llfind that VMs and their associated VHDs can takeup a lot of space. Using Virtual Server 2005 R2'sdifferencing disks can significantly reduce the hoststorage requirements. Differencing disks enable you to createa read-only parent disk image that can provide the base formultiple other VMs, which saves a lot of host storage.

7. Remove VHDs from antivirus scanning—Antivirus scanning can drag down VM performance, soremove your VM's VHDs from antivirus scanning.This includes your .vhd, .vmc (VM configuration),.vud (undo disk), and .vsv (saved-state) files. Also, don't create your VHDs on encrypted or compressed volumes.

8. Open port 1024 for remote management—Unlikedesktop-oriented VM products—which you typically manage via a Windows GUI—you manageVirtual Server 2005 R2 by using a Web interface,facilitating remote management of the server. By default,Virtual Server 2005 R2 uses port 1024 for the managementconsole and port 5900 for the Virtual Machine Remote Control (VMRC) client. The VMRC client also uses ports 137 and138 if Kerberos is in use.

9. Configure automatic VM startup—You usuallywant VMs to automatically start whenever thehost system starts if your servers are consolidated.To configure automatic startup, open the VirtualServer Administration Web site, select the VM that you wantto automatically start, and click Configure. Then, selectGeneral Properties and in the Action when Virtual ServerStarts drop-down menu select Always automatically turn onvirtual machine.

10. Take advantage of Windows 2003 R2 virtualizationlicensing—One VM-technology gotcha is that theOS used in a guest must belicensed as if it were running on a physical device. Windows Server 2003 Release 2 (R2), Enterprise Editionand Windows 2003 R2, Datacenter Edition provide amore cost-effective model for licensing Windows Serverinstances running in VMs. Windows 2003 R2 Enterpriseallows as many as four active Windows Server instances,and Windows 2003 R2 Datacenter allows an unlimitednumber of active Windows Server instances.