Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer now available

Yesterday we released an update for Windows Server 2008 R2 which provides a “best practice analyzer” for Hyper-V.  You can read about it here: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/977238 and download it from here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=89d80c15-0082-4fef-a4fc-fefa463bed08

But what is it?  How do you use it?  And why should you care?

The Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer is a tool that will scan your Hyper-V server and let you know if there are any common best practices that you are not following.  To use it you just need to download and install the update (from the above link) and then open Server Manager.

When you select the entry for Hyper-V under the Roles node you should see a new section called Best Practice Analyzer:

image

Here you can select to scan the Hyper-V role and see how you are going against common best practices.

While this might sound boring – I have found this tool to be quite useful.  When I ran it on my server at home it alerted me to the fact that I had a virtual machine where I had not updated the integration components to the latest version.

One other neat feature of the Best Practice Analyzer is the ability to exclude results.  This way you can remove best practices that you do not believe apply to your environment – so you will not have to deal with a large number of unnecessary errors / warnings.

So go grab it and try it out on your Hyper-V server!

Cheers,
Ben