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Storage and Hyper-V Part 5 Practical Designs
Storage and Hyper-V Part 5 Practical Designs
Storage and Hyper-V Part 5 Practical Designs
www.altaro.com/hyper-v/storage-and-hyper-v-part-5-practical-designs/
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Overview
There is no one single right way to design storage for a Hyper-V environment. It’s certainly
possible to build a storage solution that uses more than one component. In this way, you
can employ high-performance hardware to satisfy needs of high-performance virtual
machines while allowing slower and lower-cost storage equipment to handle your more
mundane tasks.
In general, I prefer using an installation of the free Hyper-V Server above Windows Server,
although the reasoning is a subject for another post. However, something came to my
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attention during a conversation with Jeff Hicks: if you want to use Microsoft’s deduplication
solution and all your VMs are on local storage, you’ll have to use Windows Server. Hyper-V
Server does not include this functionality. If your VMs are hosted by another system, then
that system’s capabilities will determine your VMs’ storage profile.
A serious consideration for this is VDI. This is a prime application for both Hyper-V Server
and deduplication, as the server component needs no licensing and VDI can often get a
high degree of savings from deduplication. VDI is also the primary solution that Microsoft’s
storage team had in mind when updating deduplication for virtualization loads in Windows
Server 2012 R2. If you’re going to be implementing VDI and Microsoft deduplication is
desired, consider using a file server on Windows Server 2012 R2 to store them.
Even if the host isn’t clustered, the same principles apply. You may have a guest clustered
SQL Server that runs on separate Hyper-V hosts. You can install local domain controllers
on each host but place the SQL Servers on fast external storage devices. As an aside,
there are now a number of ways to configure SQL Server for redundancy across two or
more guests besides using a guest cluster; this post is not about SQL Server so I will not
spend any time on any SQL deployment options. Consult a SQL Server expert source for
more details.
The print server role can no longer be clustered as of Windows Server 2012. Realistically,
this is a good thing. Anyone who’s ever administered a Windows print cluster can tell you
that it is a perfectly miserable experience. Starting with Windows Server 2012, the way to
make Microsoft’s print spooler highly available is by running it inside a highly available
virtual machine. This works out very well, as it’s very tough to really have a print server that
uses a great deal of compute resources. Print devices are ridiculously slow in comparison
to most anything else in the world of computing, so a print server is often able to control a
great many devices without straining itself. Also, the spooler service hits a cap of a few
thousand print queues in which it simply cannot effectively manage any more. Adding RAM,
disk, or CPU to that system will make no difference whatsoever. What that means is that
you’ll just never have a print server that demands much from its hardware. So, if your print
server must be in a clustered Hyper-V Server environment to be highly available but will
never place a serious demand on your disk, why would you want to place it on high speed
storage? The only two acceptable answers are, “We have plenty of leftover space on high
speed storage,” and, “We don’t want to place it on high speed storage.” Assuming the
latter, you could reconfigure the above so that it looks like the following:
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server represents a single point of failure. If it goes down, so does your print server. For a
print server, that’s probably not a big deal as long as you can resolve the issue quickly.
Since it’s virtualized, you can restore a backup of the VM to internal storage on one of the
hosts or to the shared storage as quickly as it takes for the bits to be copied from your
backup media. That’s a lot faster than trying to restore a physical print server.
But, even that may not be fast enough. You may want to put more protection, but not want
to spend the money necessary for a high-end SAN device with lots of internal redundancy.
Fortunately, you’ve got options. For the above scenario, my first choice would be Hyper-V
Replica. Have a standalone standby system with inexpensive internal or direct-attached
storage. Replicate the print server to it and have it running an active domain controller. This
can be accomplished with only the cost of the hardware and a single Windows Server
Standard Edition license (assuming these are the only two VMs, both are running a
Standard Edition of Windows Server, and the host performs no other roles).
You can also use SMB 3/SOFS a front-end for your SAN devices. The benefit here is that
you can expose storage that anyone can use, controlled by familiar NTFS permissions.
Virtual machines can be deployed without tapping a storage administrator to provision a
new LUN. If you’re in a smaller environment without a dedicated storage admin, you may
not use your SAN often enough to feel really comfortable with creating and configuring
LUNs every few months when a new deployment need arises.
Summary
The options presented here are just a few ideas to get your design strategy started. It is by
no means all-inclusive and I doubt that anything that fits in a blog post ever will be. Feel free
to leave any other approaches that you’ve discovered in the comments, as they’ll no doubt
be useful to others.
In the sixth part of this series, I’ll jump into some how-tos so you can seehow to connect
your storage successfully.
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Eric Siron
I have worked in the information technology field since 1998. I have
designed, deployed, and maintained server, desktop, network, and
storage systems. I provided all levels of support for businesses ranging
from single-user through enterprises with thousands of seats. Along
the way, I have achieved a number of Microsoft certifications and was
a Microsoft Certified Trainer for four years. In 2010, I deployed a
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 system and began writing about my
experiences. Since then, I have been writing regular blogs and
contributing what I can to the Hyper-V community through forum participation and free
scripts.
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