About Maintenance Hosts
Applies To: Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1
To optimize the performance of virtual machine hosts, it is recommended that you dedicate one or more hosts to be used as maintenance hosts. A maintenance host is a host that you use only for virtual machine maintenance tasks, such as patching stored virtual machines and templates or staging scripted virtual machine creation before moving the virtual machines into your production environment. By using a dedicated host to perform virtual machine maintenance tasks, you can avoid affecting the performance and host rating of a production host while performing such tasks.
Note
A maintenance host should not be confused with a host that is in maintenance mode. You start maintenance mode temporarily on a host to perform maintenance tasks to the physical host, while you designate a maintenance host to perform ongoing maintenance tasks to virtual machines. For more information about maintenance mode, see About Maintenance Mode.
You should remove a dedicated maintenance host from placement so that it will not be included in the host ratings during the placement of virtual machines. For more information about removing a host from placement, see How to Set Placement Options for a Host.
See Also
Concepts
How to Modify the Properties of a Host Group
How to Set Placement Options for a Host