Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000, Best Practices Manual

Page 1: ...Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 Family Best Practices with Hyper V Best Practices Guide By Rick Andersen and Lisa Pampuch April 2009 ...

Page 2: ...ons can have catastrophic consequences due to the highly consolidated nature of virtualized environments The Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family of storage systems is best in class for Windows Server 2008 Hyper V environments It is ideal for business that are planning new deployments in existing or new environments and for business considering virtualizing their servers and need a storag...

Page 3: ... The authors recognize and sincerely thank the following contributors and reviewers of this document Mark Adams Product Marketing Robert Burch Advanced Technical Consultants Alan Davey Storage Platforms Product Management Rob Simmons Application Solutions Eric Stephenson Hardware and Alliances Bin Bin Zhang Global Services Technical Support ...

Page 4: ...lated and Synthetic Devices 6 Hyper V Storage Options 6 Disk Type 6 Disk Interface 7 I O Paths 7 Basic Hyper V Host Setup 8 Basic Storage System Setup 9 Fibre Channel Storage Deployment 9 Storage Provisioning 15 Hyper V Protection Strategies 16 Backups 16 Storage Replication 17 Hyper V Quick Migration 17 Hitachi Storage Cluster Solution 17 Hyper V Performance Monitoring 18 Windows Performance Moni...

Page 5: ...nd management costs and eliminates performance bottlenecks This is accomplished through the use of the 2000 family s advanced point to point SAS based architecture for concurrent back end I O capacity and symmetric active active front end architecture that dynamically spreads I O workloads across resources and allows I O through any path The 2000 family is ideal for business that are planning new ...

Page 6: ...hs Choice of high performance SAS and low cost SATA disk drives Lowered costs using SAS or SATA drives that can be intermixed in the same tray Support for all major open systems operating systems host bus adapters HBAs and switch models from major vendors Scalability Ability to add capacity connectivity and performance as needed Concurrent support of large heterogeneous open systems environments u...

Page 7: ...otection Encrypted communications between management software and storage system using SSL and TSL Internet Protocol version 6 IPv6 and Internet Protocol Security IPsec compliant maintenance ports Hitachi Storage Navigator Modular 2 Software Hitachi Storage Navigator Modular 2 software is the integrated interface for Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family firmware and software features Use it to ta...

Page 8: ...lows a user to run multiple operating systems on a single physical server To use Hyper V in Windows Server 2008 enable the Hyper V role on the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 server Figure 1 illustrates Hyper V architecture Figure 1 Hyper V Architecture The Hyper V role provides the following functions Hypervisor Parent and child partitions Integration services Emulated and synthetic devices 4 ...

Page 9: ...hild partition Microsoft documentation sometimes also refers to child partitions as guest partitions This document uses the term child partition Child partitions do not have direct access to hardware resources but instead have a virtual view of the resources which are referred to as virtual devices Any request to the virtual devices is redirected via the VMBus to the devices in the parent partitio...

Page 10: ...n the parent hard disks These disks can either be SAN attached or local to the Hyper V server The child partition sees these files as its own hard disk and uses the VHD files to perform storage functions Three types of VHD disks are available for presentation to the host Fixed VHD The size of the VHD is fixed and the LU is fully allocated at the time the VHD is defined Normally this allows for bet...

Page 11: ...he disk interface is completely independent of the physical storage system Table 1 summarizes disk interface considerations and restrictions Table 1 Disk Interface Considerations Disk Interface Considerations Restrictions All child partitions must boot from an IDE device None A maximum of four IDE devices are available for each child partition A maximum of one device per IDE controller for a maxim...

Page 12: ... operating system to see and access multiple paths to the same LU enabling data to travel any available path so that users experience increased performance and continued access to data in the event of a failed path While multiple load balancing settings exist in both Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager software and Windows Server 2008 native MPIO the symmetrical active active controller feature of the 20...

Page 13: ... per controller is sufficient for redundancy on the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage Systems 2000 family This results in two paths to each LU from the Hyper V host s point of view For higher availability ensure that the target ports are configured to two separate fabrics to make sure multiple paths are always available to the Hyper V server Hyper V servers that access LUs on 2000 family storage s...

Page 14: ...troller interface for the application LUs Figure 2 Dedicated VHD Connection Key considerations For better performance and easier management of child partitions assign a single set of LUs To enable the use of Hyper V quick migration of a single child partition deploy dedicated VHDs To enable multiple child partitions to be moved together using quick migration deploy shared VHDs To achieve good perf...

Page 15: ...dividual child partitions when hosting them on a single shared VHD It is critical to ensure that the RAID group on the 2000 family storage system that is to host the shared VHD LU can support the aggregate workload of the child partitions For more information see the Number of Child Partitions per VHD per RAID Group section of this paper If using quick migration to move a child partition understan...

Page 16: ...through Connection Key considerations For higher throughput deploy pass through disks Pass through disks normally provide higher throughput because only the guest partition file system is involved To achieve an easier migration path deploy pass through disks Pass through disks can provide an easier migration path because the LUs used by a physical machine on a SAN can be moved easily to a Hyper V ...

Page 17: ...orage With the 2000 family zoning at the storage level is accomplished by using HSDs Zoning defines which LUs a particular Hyper V server can access Hitachi Data Systems recommends creating an HSD group for each Hyper V server and using the name of the Hyper V server in the HSD for documentation purposes Direct Connection One iSCSI deployment method is a direct connection to the 2000 family storag...

Page 18: ... interfere with the storage traffic on the iSCSI NICs For easier movement of child partitions between Hyper V host because no changes are required to the 2000 family storage system choose the direct connection configuration Snapshots using VSS are not supported by the direct connection configuration Dual Connection Another iSCSI deployment option is to connect the child partition to both the Hyper...

Page 19: ...2 These factors are especially important from a storage system perspective In addition the individual child partition s capacity and performance requirements basic virtual disk requirements virtual machine page space spare capacity for virtual machine snapshots and so on must also be considered Table 2 LU Sizing Factors Factor Comment Guest base OS size The guest OS resides on the boot device of t...

Page 20: ...ng data to the appropriate storage tier if needed using Hitachi Modular Volume Migration or Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager An automated solution using these applications from the Hitachi Storage Command Suite helps to reduce the administrative overhead and optimize storage utilization Hyper V Protection Strategies A successful Hyper V deployment requires careful consideration of protection strateg...

Page 21: ...his is a VHD LU that is presented to the Hyper V parent partition Do not allow any other child partitions to share the virtual machine configuration file or VHD LU Sharing the virtual machine configuration file or VHD LU among child partitions can lead to corruption of data For a child partition with a large number of LUs the 26 drive letter limitation might become an issue Pass through disks alle...

Page 22: ...parent it cannot identify all possible bottlenecks in an environment For a good overall understanding of the I O profile of a Hyper V parent and its guest partitions monitor the storage system s performance with Hitachi Performance Monitor feature Combining data from at least two performance monitoring tools provides a more complete picture of the Hyper V environment Remember that PerfMon is a per...

Page 23: ...r feature When a problem such as slow response occurs in a host an administrator can use Hitachi Performance Monitor feature to quickly determine if the disk subsystem is the source of the problem Hitachi Tuning Manager Software Hitachi Tuning Manager software enables you to proactively monitor manage and plan the performance and capacity for the Hitachi modular storage that is attached to your Hy...

Page 24: ...s and other countries ShadowImage and TrueCopy are registered trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems All other trademarks service marks and company names mentioned in this document or website are properties of their respective owners Notice This document is for information purposes only and does not set forth any warranty expressed or implied concerning any equipment or service offered or to be offere...