A subject that has generated much interest in the Citrix community planning and design of a solution XenDesktop 7.1 on Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2. Citrix Consulting has published a new update of the Citrix Virtual Desktop Manual, which includes the design decisions when deploying XenDesktop 7.1 on Hyper-V 2012 R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2. In anticipation of the new version, I will publish a series of Hyper-V 2012 R2 blogs, each of which will focus on another subject addressed in the manual. This week I'll take a look at some of the new Hyper-V 2012 R2 features networking that you should consider when designing a XenDesktop.
Some notable changes in networking in Windows Server 2012 R2 that will have a direct impact on the design of XenDesktop 7.1 on Hyper-V 2012 R2.
- NIC teaming. NIC teaming in Hyper-V 08 R2 are not natively supported in the operating system, and requires third-party software management NIC. That changed in Windows Server 2012/2012 R2. With the integrated native support in the operating system, NIC teaming is easier to install and apply to Hyper-V servers. I recommend the NIC teaming configuration on all Hyper-V hosts used in XenDesktop solutions, especially hosts that are clustered. It is possible to create virtual NIC teams in VM as well, but this adds complexity to the solution. For most XenDesktop deployments team creating the physical layer will be sufficient.
- virtual NIC in the parent partition. in Hyper-V 08 R2 you are limited to a virtual network adapter in the parent partition. In Hyper-V 2012 R2, you can create multiple virtual cards in the parent partition. This is very useful when you have a limited number of physical network adapters available for example- blade servers. With XenDesktop on Hyper-V, there are usually five networks to consider: management, cluster, live migration, the network and storage VM. Hyper-V 08 R2 requires physical NICs to isolate each of these networks. Hyper-V 2012 R2, you can get a pair of physical NICs teamed and four virtual NICs in the parent partition. For example, consider a blade server with two physical NICs 10Gbps. Create the NIC team and enable the Hyper-V role. The Hyper-V virtual switch is associated with the NIC team. Virtual NICs can be created (using PowerShell commands) for the management, cluster, live migration and storage (if you use iSCSI) networks in the parent partition. Then I recommend configuring VLANs on virtual NIC connections to isolate the different traffic (using PowerShell as well). For more information about PowerShell commands, please see the Microsoft TechNet article - What's New in Hyper-V Virtual Switch. Once the virtual NICs are created, the Hyper-V host will look like the image below with all virtual cards routing through the Hyper-V virtual switch.
- SR-IOV. 2012/2012 R2 Hyper-V supports Single Root I / O Virtualization (SR-IOV) capable network adapters. This allows virtual machines to directly access the physical network adapter, which improves I / O performance when SR-IOV is enabled, however, the traffic bypasses the Hyper-V virtual switch and can not take advantage redundancy provided by the associated NIC team to Hyper-V virtual switch. Teaming SR-IOV enabled NICs is not supported, so for SR-IOV in XenDesktop is recommended only on dedicated networks live migration. You gain performance but lose redundancy so use with caution
Some XenDesktop key network design decisions :.
- What kind of physical network adapters to use [1945006?] to improve Hyper-V 2012 R2 performance consider using physical NICs with the following properties:
- 1Gbps or more (10Gbps is preferred for larger deployments)
- Unload hardware support - Reduces the use of IOs network processor. Hyper-V supports largesend Offload and TCP checksum offloading
- Receive Side Scaling (RSS) support - .. Improve the performance of Hyper-V hosts multiprocessor allowing network receive the treatment that will be distributed in the CPU
- Dynamic Virtual Machine queue (dVMQ) Support - This also improves the performance of Hyper-V hosts multiprocessor distributing traffic management for specific VM queues across CPUs
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- How many physical networks to plan? For most deployments, there will be four networks: management, cluster, live migration and VM network (assuming storage traffic uses an HBA connection). Using Hyper-V hosts with a pair of 10Gbps network adapters teamed should be enough.
- What type of virtual network adapters to use? Hyper-V 2012 R2 supports three types of virtual cards:
- Standard. fast performance synthetic virtual card that is used by default when creating Hyper-V virtual machines. This adapter must be selected when creating virtual machines using machines Creation Services.
- Legacy. multiport emulated December 21140 10/100 Mbps adapter. It does not work as well as the standard adapter, but it is necessary when creating virtual machines using Provisioning services as it uses for PXE boot desktops. A new feature added to Provisioning Services 7 is the ability for virtual machines to move above the map inherited from the standard adapter after booting VM. For the move to produce the standard adapter must be on the same subnet as the legacy adapter. The problem with this configuration is that it requires your virtual machines to have two network cards, and double the number of DHCP leased the necessary IP addresses. To keep the design and management simpler, I recommend using only the legacy NIC when using Provisioning Services. Note: Hyper-V 2012 R2 supports the generation 2 virtual machines can PXE boot using the standard adapter, however XenDesktop 7 does not support the Hyper-V VM Generation 2 [
- Fibre Channel. special adapter when use for virtual machines requiring direct access to virtual SANs. This virtual network adapter is not supported on virtual machines running the Windows desktop operating system. It will be a rare circumstance to never use with XenDesktop 7 deployments.
- Should I use separate VLANs for virtual desktops? For security reasons keeping virtual desktops separate the infrastructure network is seen as a good practice.
- What type of virtual networks to configure? 2012/2012 R2 Hyper-V allows you to create networks that are external, internal or private. External allows VMs to communicate with anything on the physical network, and is the only type of virtual network necessary for most XenDesktop deployments. Internal allows virtual machines on the same host to communicate with each and Hyper-V host. Private allows virtual machines on the same host only communicate. Both internal and private networks will not be practical for most XenDesktop deployments.
The next week we'll take a look at some new storage features in Hyper-V 2012 R2 and considerations of storage design for XenDesktop 7.1.
Ed Duncan - Senior Consultant
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