6 INCREASING STORAGE EFFICIENCY AND FLEXIBILITY

Hyper-V provides an excellent means to increase the hardware utilization of the physical
servers. By increasing hardware utilization, the amount of hardware in a data center can be
reduced, lowering the cost of data center operations. In a traditional Hyper-V environment,
the process of migrating physical servers to Hyper-V child VMs does not reduce the
amount of data stored or the amount of storage provisioned. By default, server
virtualization does not have any impact on improving storage utilization (and in many cases
might have the opposite effect). NetApp offers storage virtualization technologies that can
further enhance the storage virtualization achieved by these types of disks. These NetApp
technologies offer considerable storage savings by providing the capability to thin
provision the SAN LUNs and also deduplicate redundant data on them. Both of these
technologies are native to NetApp storage systems and don’t require any configuration
considerations or changes to be implemented in the Hyper-V environment.
6.1 STORAGE THIN PROVISIONING
Traditional storage provisioning and the preallocation of storage on disk is a well
understood method for storage administrators. It is a common practice for server
administrators to overprovision storage in order to avoid running out of storage and
the associated application downtime when expanding the provisioned storage.
Although no system can be run at 100% storage utilization, there are methods of
storage virtualization that allow administrators to address and oversubscribe storage in
the same manner as with server resources (such as CPU, memory, networking, and so
on). This form of storage virtualization is referred to as “thin provisioning.”
Traditional provisioning preallocates storage; thin provisioning provides storage on
demand. The value of thin provisioned storage is that storage is treated as a shared
resource pool and is consumed only as each individual VM requires it. This sharing
increases the total utilization rate of storage by eliminating the unused but provisioned
areas of storage that are associated with traditional storage. The drawback to thin
provisioning and oversubscribing storage is that (without the addition of physical
storage) if every child VM requires its maximum possible storage at the same time,
then there will not be enough storage to satisfy the requests. NetApp thin provisioning
allows LUNs that are presented as physical disks to be provisioned to their total
capacity, yet consume only as much storage as is required to store the VHD files. In
addition, LUNs connected as pass-through disks can also be thin provisioned.
Best Practice
NetApp recommends using thin provisioned LUNs where possible in the Hyper-V
environment for maximum storage efficiency. However, when enabling NetApp thin
provisioning, administrators should also configure storage management policies on the
volumes that contain the thin-provisioned LUNs. The use of these policies aids in
providing the thin-provisioned LUNs with storage capacity as they require it. The
policies include automatic sizing of a volume, automatic NetApp Snapshot deletion,
and LUN fractional reserve.