Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2

By Matt McSpirit - virtualboy. Microsoft Partner Technology Specialist for Virtualization;
http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit

Earlier today, I was having a brief conversation over email with one of the chaps over at Intel UK, who had a question around Windows Server 2008 R2’s use of Turbo Boost, which is a capability of the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem), that allows those processors to achieve additional performance when it is most useful.  Some of you may relate this almost to a controlled, automated overclocking as and when necessary.  Now, although I’d say my knowledge of Windows Server 2008 R2 is pretty good, I didn’t know the answer to this little belter, so I bing’d.

The Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2 is what I found.

Aside from answering the question around Turbo Boost (see pages 14-16 of the doc if you’re interested in tweaking Turbo Boost in R2 to kick in on the ‘balanced’ power setting, as usually, by default, it’s only applicable on High Performance), I found there was a wealth of info on Web, RDS, Hyper-V and more.  If you want a more exhaustive list:

• Choosing and Tuning Server Hardware
• Performance Tuning for the Networking Subsystem
• Performance Tuning for the Storage Subsystem
• Performance Tuning for Web Servers
• Performance Tuning for File Servers
• Performance Tuning for Active Directory Servers
• Performance Tuning for Remote Desktop Session Host (formerly Terminal Server)
• Performance Tuning for Remote Desktop Gateway
• Performance Tuning for Virtualization Servers
• Performance Tuning for File Server Workload (NetBench)
• Performance Tuning for Network Workload (NTttcp)
• Performance Tuning for Remote Desktop Services Knowledge Worker Workload
• Performance Tuning for SAP Sales and Distribution Two-Tier Workload

Very useful indeed, and at just over 90 pages, we’re not talking a novel here.  If you’re interested, grab it here.