Hyper-V Dynamic Memory

Hyper-V Dynamic Memory

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Aidan Finn

16 June 2011

http://www.aidanfinn.com/

A Guide to Hyper-V Dynamic Memory

Understanding, enabling, and configuring Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Dynamic Memory for virtualised workloads

This document and parts thereof are the sole property of Aidan Finn and may not be copied, reproduced, shared or distributed in any shape or form, physical or digital, without the sole and express permission of Aidan Finn.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 5

Understanding Dynamic Memory ........................................................................................................... 6

Before Dynamic Memory .................................................................................................................... 6

The Challenges before Dynamic Memory ........................................................................................... 6

The Basics of Dynamic Memory .......................................................................................................... 8

The Architecture of Dynamic Memory ............................................................................................. 12

Dynamic Memory at the Virtual Machine Level ............................................................................... 14

The Virtual Machine’s View of Dynamic Memory ............................................................................ 17

This is Not Over Commitment ........................................................................................................... 21

Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) ............................................................................................ 22

Dynamic Memory Strategies ................................................................................................................. 24

Configuring Dynamic Memory .............................................................................................................. 25

Requirements .................................................................................................................................... 25

Upgrade the Parent Partition ............................................................................................................ 25

Integration Components ................................................................................................................... 25

Supported Guest Operating Systems ................................................................................................ 26

Configuring Dynamic Memory in the Hyper-V Manager .................................................................. 27

Host Settings ................................................................................................................................. 27

Virtual Machine Settings ............................................................................................................... 27

Configuring Dynamic Memory in SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 ................................................................... 28

Monitoring and Troubleshooting ...................................................................................................... 31

Monitoring Dynamic Memory....................................................................................................... 31

Troubleshooting Dynamic Memory .............................................................................................. 33

General Recommendations .................................................................................................................. 35

Cluster Failover ................................................................................................................................. 35

Storage Sizing .................................................................................................................................... 35

Host Storage Sizing ........................................................................................................................ 35

Paging File ..................................................................................................................................... 36

Application