18 Hyper-V Requirements and Recommended Hardware

Below is a list of requirements and recommended hardware when you set up a Hyper-V host or system.

Every “modern” PC bought within the last five years will satisfy the above requirement.

Here are some real world Hyper-V requirements

• Use really fast hard drives, ideally SSD.
• RAID striping probably won’t help as much as a really fast SSD or at least hybrid SSD drives
• Storage: the more the better. Buy at least twice as much hard drive space as you think you need today
• RAM: 128 GB and up. Use the fastest RAM available of the type: ECC RAM
• CPU: The more cores the better. You will want to allocate certain cores to certain VMs for best performance
• Hard disk arrays should be strategically separated. Use several fast hard drive arrays rather than one single array
• Having separate arrays makes it easier split the virtual disk load to separate hard drive clusters. Mechanic drives impose a huge penalty when having to move the drive heads. SSDs don’t have this issue but wear down much faster than mechanical drives. Having separate arrays reduces this effect dramatically.
• Multi-processor motherboards may not be worth the money, depending on your situation. You may be better off using separate clustered, lower-cost Hyper-V servers. Remember that Windows Server 2012 R2 and later offer “shared nothing live migration” so you don’t have to have a SAN and a CSV to build a great, small, and effective data center. Windows Server 2016 introduced Storage Spaces that you can use to build a software based storage device at much lower cost.
• We recommend Seagate drives. We’re not affiliated with Seagate. But from our test lab experience, no other manufacturers hardware survived our Hyper-V backup test procedures.
• Use a server case that is very well ventilated and has dust filtration. Unlike an average server, Hyper-V servers burn a lot of energy. Also swapping drives should be simple.
• Format using 4KB NTFS and do not use file system compression or encryption
• Use GPT layouts for data disks so you can grow volumes as necessary
• Use a separate disk array for the system paging file. Hyper-V needs a paging file that is 3x the RAM size. Use a fixed size (min and max the same value)
• Use BackupChain to protect your investment.