Users Guide

20 Solutions Overview Guide

NOTE: All the current (as of September 2008) shipping Dual-socket and Quad-

socket Dell PowerEdge servers meet all of the above processor requirements.

If the Hyper-V hosts will be part of a Hyper-V Host Cluster configuration, Dell

strongly recommends that all the processors on all the Hyper-V hosts that are

part of that configuration be identical. If not, there is a possibility that

migrations of virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts will be unsuccessful.

For more information, refer to the Dell High Availability Solutions Guide for

Microsoft Hyper-V.

Based on the engineering evaluations, Dell recommends that dual-socket or

quad-socket based PowerEdge servers for all virtualization workloads. Dell

provides customers with the choice of many multi-core processors for use on

PowerEdge servers.

Memory Considerations

Virtualization workloads are memory intensive. This is especially true when

one of the goals for the virtualization deployment is consolidation. The

amount of memory allocated to a specific virtual machine is dependent on

the workload running on the guest operating system. In a physical to virtual

migration deployment, the information obtained from the aforementioned

virtualization assessment will provide very useful information on sizing the

memory for the virtual machines. It should be noted that a guest operating

system only has access to the amount of memory that has been allocated to

that virtual machine. In Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, changing the memory

configuration requires the virtual machine to be powered-off.

Once the amount of memory for the virtual machines is known, the memory

requirements for the physical server can be determined. It is strongly

recommended that when the Hyper-V role is configured, no other roles be

enabled in the parent partition. However, the parent partition should have

sufficient memory to provide management capabilities and virtual device

functionality for child partitions as well as for managing the physical devices

on the server.