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Introduction
9 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Windows Server Best Practices | 680-042-007
It is important to remember that best practices are baselines that may not be ideal for every environment.
Some notable exceptions include the following:
• A legacy system that is performing well that has not reached its life expectancy may not adhere to
current best practices. Often the best course of action is to run legacy configurations until they reach
their life expectancy because it is too disruptive or costly to make changes outside of a normal
hardware progression or upgrade cycle. Dell EMC recommends upgrading to the latest technologies
and incorporating current best practices at key opportunities such as upgrading or replacing
infrastructure.
• A common best practices tradeoff is to implement a less-resilient design on lower-tier hardware (to
save cost and reduce complexity) in a test or development environment that is not business critical.
Note: While following the best practices in this document is strongly recommended by Dell EMC, some
recommendations may not apply to all environments. For questions about the applicability of these guidelines
in your environment, contact your Dell EMC representative.
1.6 General best practices for Windows Server
In most cases, Windows Server will perform optimally with default out-of-the-box settings. Tuning may be
required depending on the type of server roles, features, and hosted workloads. This paper provides
additional guidance for SAN and DAS configurations with SC Series storage. See resources such the
Microsoft Windows IT Pro Center for guidance on general Windows Server best practices that are not specific
to external storage.
Some of the most common design, installation, configuration and tuning best practices for Windows Server
include the following:
• Keep the design simple.
• Ensure redundancies with core design elements to eliminate single points of failure.
• Leverage Server Core to minimize the attack surface of a server and reduce administrative overhead.
• Leverage Windows Admin Center to centrally manage hosts and clusters.
• Ensure that all hosts and VMs are patched regularly.
• Provide means for adequate malware protection.
• Ensure that essential data is protected with back-ups that meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and
recovery point objectives (RPO).
• Minimize or disable unnecessary hardware devices and services to free up host CPU cycles and
memory that can be used by other processes (this also helps to reduce power consumption).
• Schedule tasks such as periodic maintenance, backups, malware scans, and patching to run after
hours, and stagger start times when such operations overlap and are CPU or I/O intensive.
• Tune application workloads to reduce or eliminate unnecessary processes or activity.
• Leverage Microsoft PowerShell or other scripting tools to automate step-intensive repeatable tasks to
ensure consistency and avoid human error (this can also help reduce administration time).