Understanding physical memory characteristics

Before diving into memory mechanics in Hyper-V Server, take the time to acclimate yourself to memory hardware. A system intended to host virtual machines is often the first time many administrators are introduced to high quantities of memory in a single system, and they are often surprised at how complicated the subject can actually be. Four sticks of 8 GB DIMMs may have the same capacity as two sticks of 16 GB DIMMs, but they won't always function in exactly the same way. Sometimes the distinction is meaningless; sometimes there are measurable performance differences.

Tip

Be wary of going too far with memory optimization and tuning. Unless you are building a system that will perform very high quantities of transactional processing (as in hundreds per second), you may never even notice any delays in memory performance. Out of all the systems you will work with in your Hyper-V Server cluster, memory is one of the fastest by an order of magnitude...