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Introduction
5 Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series and Microsoft Hyper-V | 3921-BP-WS
1 Introduction
Microsoft Hyper-V and Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series storage are feature-rich solutions that together
present a diverse range of configuration options to solve key business objectives such as storage capacity,
performance, and resiliency. This section provides an overview of ME4 Series storage, Microsoft Hyper-V,
and general best practices for the solution described in this paper.
1.1 ME4 Series overview
The ME4 Series includes entry-level storage appliances that provide many features found in more advanced
storage solutions. The base models include the PowerVault ME4012, ME4024, and ME4084.
Front and rear view of the PowerVault ME4024 array, configured with 24 SSD drives and dual
controllers
The ME4 Series 2U-chassis models include the ME4012 array which supports up to twelve 3.5-inch drives,
and the ME4024 array which supports up to twenty-four 2.5-inch drives. The ME4084 array (5U chassis)
supports up to eighty-four 2.5-inch drives. All three models support additional drive capacity by adding
expansion enclosures.
Key features of the ME4 Series include the following:
• Simple, customer-installable design
• Intuitive web-based GUI and CLI tools for system configuration and management
• All-inclusive feature-licensing model
• Support for all-flash, spinning, and hybrid drive configurations
• Linear and virtual disk group and pool configuration options
• Thin-provisioning with virtual disk groups for storage efficiency, along with storage tiering for
intelligent real-time data placement for hot and cold data
• A variety of RAID levels and hot spare configurations, including distributed sparing with the new
ADAPT RAID option
• Full support for multipath I/O (MPIO) with up to eight front-end (FE) ports per array (four per controller
head)
• Active-active controller configuration that permits asymmetrical logical unit access (ALUA) aware
hosts to automatically designate MPIO FE paths as optimal or non-optimal
• FE transport options including 12Gb SAS, 8Gb/16Gb Fibre Channel (FC), and 1Gb/10Gb iSCSI