Windows Server 2012 has been out for a while so it’s
time to look at some of the performance optimizations we can make and get the most out of Microsoft’s latest server OS. In this new series about Windows 2012 we’ll cover important tuning parameters and settings that you can adjust to improve the performance and energy efficiency of the operating system. We’ll describe each setting and its potential effect to your system, workload, and performance goals.
This will be be a multi-part series covering the various different technologies and subsystems that can benefit from performance optimization. We’ll discuss the following topics in this series:
- Hardware Selection
- Performance Tuning the Network Subsystem
- Optimizing the Storage Subsystem
In addition to the server subsystems, we’ll also focus on performance related guidelines for the various server roles:
- Tuning Web Servers
- Performance Tuning File Servers
- Performance Tuning Active Directory
- Optimizing Remote Desktop
- Performance Tuning Hyper-V
- Performance Tuning OLTP Workloads
For each topic we’ll cover the monitoring counters you can use to measure performance for CPU, network, disk system, and other relevant counters. To have the most impact, your tuning changes should consider the hardware, the workload, the power budgets, and the performance goals of your server. In this series we will discuss important tuning considerations and settings that can result in improved performance or energy efficiency. We mention energy efficiency because in recent years people have become increasingly concerned about datacenter energy consumption. Windows Server 2012 (as well as Windows 2008 R2) have optimized features, algorithms, and settings to maximize energy efficiency with little effects on performance.
Several recommendations we give you might require making changes to registry settings. As always, be careful when you edit the registry. Back it up before you make any changes.
