How to manage using the Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer

Hyper-V Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager are always tools for managing virtual machines. However, none of the tools directly indicates whether your Hyper-V configuration complies with Microsoft's recommended best practices. To understand this information, you must use better environmental management tools to--hyper-v the best Practice Analyzer.

Hyper-V Best Practices Analyzer: Access through Windows Server 2012 Server Manager

Select the Hyper-V server or the other server you want to scan, and then click the Start Scan button. The scanning process is usually quick and simple, but I recommend avoiding best practice scans of highly loaded Hyper-V servers, because scanning can increase server load immediately. Before you scan a high load host server, consider migrating one or two new virtual machines to another host.

Unlike some other best practice scans, hyper-V scanning results are fairly short. Even so, I recommend filtering the list of results to show only alarms and error messages. You can select the Alarm and error options by using the Drop-down button shown in Figure C.

When you check for errors and alarm messages, know that not all errors or alarms mean there is a problem. For example, the error message displayed by the scan results in the notification that a virtual machine backup should be performed once a week. I backed up the virtual machine, but Hyper-V did not recognize the backup method used.

On the other hand, alarm messages are sometimes more serious than errors. For example, an alert generated by a scan indicates that the current version of the integration service should run on all virtual machines. Running an outdated version of the integration service may adversely affect the performance of the virtual machine. I performed a best practice scan of an experimental server and thought that none of the experimental virtual machines ran the current version of the integration service. This is a good example of an alert message indicating that a previously unknown problem needs to be addressed.

This raises another question point: When you click event Logging, the Best Practice Analyzer will display more information. For example, when you click on the alert information associated with the integrated service version, the Best Practices Analyzer provides me with a globally unique identifier for the three virtual machines that need to be upgraded. Text information also provides a description of the Upgrade integration service.

The Hyper-V Best Practices Analyzer is useful for ensuring that the host server complies with Microsoft recommended best practices. However, not all reported situations mean that there are problems, so in analyzing these results you must use some common sense to judge.