Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series and Microsoft Hyper-V Abstract This document provides best practices for configuring Microsoft® HyperV® to perform optimally with Dell EMC™ PowerVault™ ME4 Series storage.
Revisions Revisions Date Description September 2018 Initial release Acknowledgements Author: Marty Glaser The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.
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Executive summary Executive summary This document provides best practices for deploying Microsoft® Windows Server® Hyper-V® based solutions with Dell EMC™ PowerVault™ ME4 Series storage systems. It builds upon the resources listed in appendix A.1. Before configuring an ME4 Series array to work optimally with Hyper-V, review the primary reference documents including the ME4 Series Administrator’s Guide and Deployment Guide on Dell.com/support.
Introduction 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.
Introduction • • • • • • • Support for mixed transport environments (FC and iSCSI) Up to nine back-end (BE) expansion enclosures can be added to each ME4 Series array with 12Gb SAS to expand drive capacity Support for up to 336 drives with up to 4 petabytes (PB) raw capacity in the ME4084 array Direct-attached storage (DAS) support for FE ports (SAS, FC, and iSCSI) Storage area network (SAN) support for FE ports connected to FC and iSCSI switches (FE SAS supports DAS only) Scheduled and on-demand volume sn
Introduction the default queue-depth setting works well for most hosts in a SAN environment. However, increasing the queue depth for a large sequential workload running on a small number of hosts might result in a significant performance increase, while doing the same for a non-sequential workload running on many hosts might have the opposite result, degraded performance.
Design best practices 2 Design best practices This section provides guidance on sizing and configuration options for ME4 Series storage and Hyper-V. 2.1 Right-size the storage array Before deploying a new ME4 Series storage array, it is important to consider the environmental design factors that impact storage capacity and performance so that new or expanded storage is right-sized for the environment.
Design best practices From the perspective of Hyper-V, any of the available configurations is supported. Choosing the best type of disk group and RAID option is a function of the workload running on Hyper-V, and the ME4 Series Administrator’s Guide provides basic guidance. 2.3 Determine optimal transport and front-end configuration The ME4 Series is configurable as direct-attached storage (DAS) or as part of a storage area network (SAN). Supported transports for DAS include SAS, FC, and iSCSI.
Design best practices Hyper-V hosts, nodes, and clusters support all the above configuration options.
Administration best practices 3 Administration best practices 3.1 Guest integration services Guest integration services are a package of virtualization-aware drivers that are installed on a guest VM to optimize the guest VM virtual hardware for interaction with the physical host hardware and storage. Installing these drivers is typically the first step for optimizing VM performance.
Administration best practices For versions of Hyper-V prior to 2016, use Hyper-V Manager to connect to a VM. Under the Action menu, mount the Integration Services Setup Disk (an ISO file), and follow the prompts in the guest VM console to complete the installation. Mounting the integration services ISO is no longer supported with Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V because integration services are provided exclusively as part of Windows updates.
Administration best practices Verification can also be performed using PowerShell, as shown in the following example: PS C:\Windows\system32> get-VM | Select-Object name, integrationservicesversion Name IntegrationServicesVersion ---------------------------MG-VM12a 6.3.9600.18080 MG-VM12b 6.3.9600.18080 MG-VM12c 6.3.9600.18080 MG-VM12d 6.3.9600.18080 3.
Administration best practices 3.2.1 Convert VMs to a newer generation Note the warning message in Figure 7 that the VM generation cannot be changed once a VM has been created. However, it is now possible to convert a VM from generation 1 to generation 2. While Microsoft has ongoing efforts to provide tools to perform this action, third-party tools are available (use at your own risk). More information on this topic can be found on Microsoft TechNet. 3.
Administration best practices 3.3.2 Virtual hard disk type In addition to the format, a virtual hard disk can be designated as fixed, dynamically expanding, or differencing. Virtual hard disk type options The dynamically expanding disk type will work well for most workloads on ME4 Series arrays.
Administration best practices There are some performance and management best practices to keep in mind when choosing the right kind of virtual hard disk type for your environment. • • • 16 Fixed-size virtual hard disks: - Are recommended for virtual hard disks that experience a high level of disk activity, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, or OS page or swap files. For many workloads, the performance difference between fixed and dynamic will be negligible.
Administration best practices 3.3.3 Virtual hard disks and thin provisioning with ME4 Series arrays It does not matter which type of virtual hard disk is used to in order maximize the space utilization on ME4 Series storage when leveraging thin provisioning at the array level. Regardless of the virtual hard disk type, only the actual data written by a guest VM will consume space on the storage array due to the advantages of thin provisioning.
Administration best practices To mitigate risks, consider the following recommendations: • Create a Hyper-V physical host volume that is large enough so that current and future expanding dynamic virtual hard disks will not fill the host volume to capacity. Creating large Hyper-V host volumes will not waste space on ME4 Series arrays that leverage thin provisioning. - • 3.
Administration best practices 3.4.2 Mixed transports There is limited Microsoft support for using mixed transports to present an ME4 Series LUN to a Windows Server Hyper-V host or cluster node, and this not recommended as a best practice. In each a Hyper-V cluster environment, all nodes should be configured to use a common transport (FC, iSCSI, or SAS).
Administration best practices Note the following: • • The active/optimized paths are associated with the ME4 Series storage controller head that owns the volume. The active/unoptimized paths are associated with the other controller head. If each controller has four FE transport paths configured (shown in Figure 12), each volume that is mapped should list eight total paths: four that are optimized, and four that are unoptimized. Best practices recommendations include the following: • • • • • 3.4.
Administration best practices There are also disadvantages to using direct-attached storage for guest VMs: • • • The ability to perform native Hyper-V snapshots is lost. However, the ability to leverage ME4 Series snapshots of the underlying volume is unaffected. Complexity increases, requiring more management overhead to support. VM mobility is reduced due to creating a physical hardware layer dependency.
Administration best practices Some advantages for a many-to-one strategy include the following: • • Fewer ME4 Series array volumes to create and administer (avoids volume sprawl) Quicker VM deployment because creating additional guest VMs does not require creation of a new volume on the ME4 Series array Some advantages for a one-to-one strategy include the following: • • • • Easier to isolate and monitor disk I/O patterns for a specific Hyper-V guest VM Ability to quickly restore a guest VM by simply rec
Administration best practices 3.7 Placement of Active Directory domain controllers It is a best practice to avoid configuring a Microsoft Active Directory® (AD) domain controller as a Hyper-V guest VM on a Hyper-V cluster when the cluster service requires AD authentication to start. Consider this scenario: A service outage takes the cluster offline (including the domain controller VM).
Administration best practices hosts all competing for a few target ports, increasing the queue depth on a few hosts might overdrive the target ports and negatively impact the performance of all connected hosts. While increasing the queue depth can sometimes increase performance significantly for specific workloads, if it is set too high, there is an increased risk of overdriving the target ports on the storage array.
ME4 Series snapshots with Hyper-V 4 ME4 Series snapshots with Hyper-V ME4 Series snapshots can be used to protect Hyper-V workloads. They are space-efficient snapshots, meaning they consume no additional space unless they are mapped to a host and new data is written. For general use cases and best practices regarding snapshots, see the ME4 Series Administrator’s Guide.
ME4 Series snapshots with Hyper-V Option 2: Map a snapshot containing the VM configuration and virtual hard disks to the host as a new volume, in a side-by-side fashion using a new drive letter or mount point. The VM can be recovered by manually copying the virtual hard disks from the recovery snapshot to the original location. • • • • This involves deleting, moving, or renaming the original virtual hard disks.
ME4 Series snapshots with Hyper-V Option 2: Map the recovery volume to another Windows host outside of the cluster and use Diskpart.exe or PowerShell to change the disk ID. Once the ID has been changed, remap the recovery volume to the cluster. The steps to use Diskpart.exe to change the disk ID are detailed in section 4.2.3. 4.2.3 Change a CSV disk ID with Diskpart Follow these steps to change a volume disk ID. PowerShell can also be used. 1.
ME4 Series snapshots with Hyper-V The new disk (Disk 3 in this example) should now be listed. Usually, the bottom disk will be the one most recently added. 10. Type select disk # (# represents the number of the new disk, Disk 3 in this example) and press [Enter]. 11. Type uniqueid disk and press [Enter] to view the current ID for the disk. 12. To change the disk ID, type uniqueid disk ID= and press [Enter]. - For , provide a random ID of your choice.
ME4 Series snapshots with Hyper-V 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.
Technical support and additional resources A Technical support and additional resources Dell.com/support is focused on meeting customer needs with proven services and support. Storage solutions technical documents provide expertise that helps to ensure customer success on Dell EMC storage platforms. A.1 Related resources The following ME4 Series publications and additional resources are available at Dell.com/support.
