Dell EMC XC Series Appliances and XC Core Systems Best Practices for Running Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V Abstract This best practices guidance is aimed XC Series Appliances and Core Systems configured to boot Hyper-V nodes from a Boot Optimized Server Storage (BOSS) card boot device. This document provides recommendations for maintaining the stability and performance of the platform and workloads, while also preserving the operational lifetime of the boot device.
Dell EMC Best Practices
Revisions Revisions Date Description January 2018 Initial release August 2018 Updated content to include XC Core. The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.
Revisions Table of contents Revisions.............................................................................................................................................................................3 Preface ................................................................................................................................................................................5 Executive summary................................................................................................
Preface Preface NOTE: The information in this document applies to both Dell EMC XC Series Appliances, as well as the Dell EMC XC Core System offering. Sections or information that apply to only one of the offerings (XC Series or XC Core) will be called out explicitly. The Dell EMC XC Series Appliances and XC Core Systems are optimized to host scalable compute, storage, networking, and virtualization workloads.
Boss card information 1 Boss card information 1.1 Important information about the Boss (PCIe cards M.2 Drive) The Boot Optimized Server Storage (BOSS) card shipped with XC Series appliances is the appliance boot device. This PCIe card supports up to two M.2 SATA SSDs configured in RAID1 for high availability. Note: Write intensive activities and processes leveraged by XC Series appliances, are intended to take place on the SSDs and HDDs and not the BOSS boot device.
Boss card information Virtual Machines (VMs) run on the boot device are not highly available and potentially fill up the local boot device, which results in crashing the host hypervisor. This adds additional wear on the boot device. Note: The Nutanix Cluster Checker (NCC) v. 2.2.2 and later monitors for VMs running on the boot device. Important: A common cause for VMs being run from the boot device is misconfiguration during any add-node or redeployment operation.
Boss card information • • • Directories where virtual machines and virtual disks are stored C:\windows\system32\vmms.exe C:\windows\system32\vmwp.exe If these exclusion rules are not created, you may encounter errors when creating and starting virtual machines. Furthermore, the use of anti-malware in the management operating system may be associated with a nontrivial performance impact and premature wear out of the BOSS boot drive.
Required Microsoft updates 2 Required Microsoft updates Microsoft suggest that all critical updates are applied and that all nodes in the cluster have matching updates. 2.1 Cluster Aware Updating feature Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) is a Microsoft feature that enables automated rolling updates of clustered servers.
Kerberos enablement on Nutanix Hyper-V clusters 3 Kerberos enablement on Nutanix Hyper-V clusters After AOS version 5.1.3, NTLM is not used to access the SMB3 shares. Kerberos must be set up on all Nutanix Hyper-V clusters. For more information, see: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=HyperV-Admin-AOS-v55:hyp-kerberosenable-t.html 3.1 Kerberos time Time skew should not be more than 5 minutes. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj852172(v=ws.11).aspx 3.1.
Kerberos enablement on Nutanix Hyper-V clusters Note: To determine the correct time zone, refer to the List of tz database time zones For example, to set the time zone to Ireland, issue: nutanix@NTNX-CHASSIS1-3-CVM:~$ ncli cluster set-timezone timezone=Europe/Dublin Please reboot the CVM or restart all services on the cluster so that logs are timestamped with the new Timezone.
Active Directory and DNS best practices 4 Active Directory and DNS best practices 4.1 Active Directory, Organizational Units (OUs), and Group Policy Objects (GPOs) To minimize misapplication of GPOs and other policies to the XC Series hosts configured to run Hyper-V, Dell EMC recommends placing the XC Series hosts in to their own OU and linking only specific GPOs to that OU. By default, when adding to Active Directory, the Nutanix cluster nodes are added to the computer’s Computers OU.
