CSV Cache with Hyper-V

Q: Should I enable CSV Cache with Hyper-V?

A: Yes, definitely! Hyper-V uses unbuffered I/O for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), which means the I/O operations aren't cached by the Windows Cache Manager. CSV Cache provides cache for read requests using system memory, whereas writes are still written through directly to disk and bypass the cache. In Windows Server 2012 the cache must be enabled and the size of the cache configured; in Windows Server 2012 R2 the cache is enabled by default. For a complete walkthrough of the configuration, see "Configuring CSV Cache." I definitely recommend using CSV Cache in Hyper-V environments, where most I/O operations are read operations.