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ME4 Series snapshots with Hyper-V
29 Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series and Microsoft Hyper-V | 3921-BP-WS
4.3 Create test environment with ME4 Series snapshots
In addition to VM recovery, ME4 Series snapshots can be used to quickly create test or development
environments that mirror a production environment. When volumes containing VMs are replicated to another
location, this makes it very easy to do this at a different location.
Note: To avoid IP, MAC address, or server name conflicts, copies of existing VMs that are brought online
should be isolated from the original VMs.
The procedure to use a snapshot to create a test environment from an existing Hyper-V guest VM is very
similar to VM recovery. The main difference is that the original VM continues operation, and the VM copy is
configured so that it is isolated from the original VM.
4.4 Migrate guest VMs with ME4 Series storage
Microsoft provides native tools to move or migrate VMs with Windows Server 2012 and 2016 Hyper-V, so
there are fewer use cases for using SAN-based snapshots to move VMs. When a guest VM is live migrated
from one node to another node within the same Hyper-V cluster configuration, no data needs to be copied or
moved because all nodes in that cluster have shared access to the underlying cluster shared volumes (CSV).
However, when an administrator needs to migrate a guest VM from one host or cluster to another host or
cluster, the data (the virtual hard disks) must be copied to the target host or cluster, and this will consume
network bandwidth and may require significant time if the virtual hard disks are extremely large. This can also
consume additional storage space unnecessarily because another copy of the data is created.
When moving VMs to another host or cluster, it may be much quicker to leverage ME4 Series storage to
unmap the host volume containing the VM configuration and virtual hard disks and map the volume to the
new target host or cluster. This can also be done using a using a snapshot.
While this might involve a small amount of downtime for the VM being moved during a maintenance window,
it might be a more practical approach than waiting for a large amount of VM data to copy over the network,
consuming additional array space unnecessarily.