Microsoft Hyper-V holds the promise of consolidation and better utilization, but how do you know if certain servers belong on a Hyper-V host? In many companies, Hyper-V starts in the lab, so it's hard to get a real-world understanding of how production systems will react when running on a shared host.

There are plenty of opinions out there, largely from database administrators and developers concerned about available resources to their applications. There are also several stories involving substandard performance of virtualized applications, but that is usually because the process wasn't fully assessed.

You can use Hyper-V Best Practices Analyzer to scan a server that is running the Hyper-V role, and help identify configurations that do not comply with the best practices of Microsoft for this role. BPA scans the configuration of the physical computer, the virtual machines, and other resources such as virtual networking and virtual storage. Scan results are displayed as a list of issues that you can sort by severity, and include recommendations for fixing issues and links to instructions. No configuration changes are made by running the scan.

Jeff Woolsey: In my last blog, we discussed Page Sharing in depth. To say this was a popular blog post would be a gross understatement. We received a lot of great feedback and a number of questions. So, I thought we'd close the loop on these questions about Page Sharing before getting to Second Level Paging in the next blog.

Microsoft's plans for cloud computing don't stop with infrastructure and applications. Company executives say Microsoft will also provide the heterogeneous management layer that customers will need to optimise application performance on-premises or in hosted environments.

The purpose of this article is to explain a troubleshooting methodology with Hyper-V that goes a little deeper than the Event Logs.  I’m creating a simple problem, starting a Virtual Machine with a corrupt .vhd file, to show how to proceed.

More and more companies are looking to IT to improve resource utilization, increase automation and flexibility, and reduce the time to roll out new applications. At the same time, there is also a demand to reduce energy consumption, datacenter footprint, and ultimately, the IT dollars spent. Accomplishing this goal requires a shift in datacenter design methodology, away from the traditional isolated islands of IT resources towards a more efficient and dynamic, converged infrastructure datacenter design; a design where pools of infrastructure resources can be allocated while business teams request application services, enabling IT organizations to respond in a matter of hours and days, rather than weeks and months