I just was aware of a new version of the
Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2016 which has been published by Microsoft.
It contains an amazing set of documentation that you can use to tune the server settings in Windows Server 2016, but also to configure and troubleshoot Hyper-V on Windows Server.
Where to find the Guidelines
Check the following entry point for an overview on hardware, Hyper-V and PowerShell tuning:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/performance-tuning/
Some Comments...
Power Plan Settings for SAP Applications
With recent Windows Server versions, Microsoft changed the default settings for the Windows Power Plan from 'High Performance' to 'Balanced' mode. This allows customers to benefit from lower power costs during times when CPU resources are on light load levels, however it brings additional latency during these times until "sleeping" CPU resources have been "waken up" to higher frequencies again.
Therefore, the 'Balanced' power plan setting and recommendations of section
Recommended Balanced Power Plan Parameters for Workloads Requiring Quick Response Times might be sufficient for applications where low response times are not a critical issue, however it is a no go for enterprise applications like SAP.
For SAP applications, we observed very volatile response times in single threaded processes that are executed during low processor load times when the Windows Power Plan stays with its default 'Balanced'.
Run times of for example SAP batch jobs vary extremely, because these jobs often don't bring sufficient load on processor resources to wake them up to highest frequency and processor frequency stays still reduced. Running these jobs, you observe quicker response times when your VM has a 'noisy neighbor' which keeps the CPU on higher frequency level. During night times when CPU resource consumers mostly sleep, response times of lower load applications get worst.
Just the other way round you would have expected!
Therefore, make sure to adapt the Power Plan of your Windows servers to 'High Performance' mode when running SAP applications.
Support of Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016
In section
Detecting bottlenecks in a virtualized environment Microsoft explains the metrics needed when it comes to support of applications in Hyper-V environments.
At May 4th 2018, we released SAP applications on Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016. As a prerequisite for SAP support, make sure that
Microsoft kb4093120 is installed. This patch is part of the April update package delivered by Microsoft.
