must be enabled within the virtual machine workload itself. Virtual SAN assignment should follow a similar pattern as Hyper-V virtual switch assignment in that, if there are different classifications of service within the SAN, it should be reflected within the fabric. As discussed in earlier sections, all physical Fibre Channel equipment must support NPIV. Hardware vendors must also provide drivers that display the Designed for Windows logo for all Fibre Channel CNAs, unless drivers are provided in-box. If zoning that is based on physical Fibre Channel switch ports is part of the fabric design, all physical ports must be added to allow for virtual machine mobility scenarios across hosts in the fabric cluster. Although virtual machines can support iSCSI boot, boot from SAN is not supported over the virtual Fibre Channel adapter and should not be considered as part of workload design. Storage Infrastructure The key attribute of the storage infrastructure for the converged pattern is the use of a traditional SAN infrastructure, but it is accessed through an Ethernet transport for the fabric, fabric management, and workload layers. As discussed earlier, the primary reason to adopt or maintain this design is to preserve existing investments in a SAN infrastructure or to maintain the current level of flexibility and capabilities that a SAN-based storage-array architecture provides, while consolidating to a single Ethernet network infrastructure. For Hyper-V failover-cluster and workload operations in a converged infrastructure, the fabric components utilize the following types of storage: Operating system: Non-shared physical boot disks (direct-attached storage or SAN) for the fabric management host servers (unless using boot from SAN) Cluster witness: Shared witness disk or file share to support the failover cluster quorum Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV): One or more shared CSV LUNs for virtual machines (Fibre Channel or iSCSI), as presented by the SAN Guest clustering [optional]: Shared Fibre Channel, shared VHDX, or shared iSCSI LUNs for guest clustering Figure 34 provides a conceptual view of this architecture for the converged pattern. Figure 43 Converged architecture pattern As outlined in the overview, fabric and fabric management host controllers require sufficient storage to account for the operating system and paging files. In Windows Server 2012 R2, we recommend that virtual memory be configured as “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives.”
must be enabled within the virtual machine workload itself. Virtual SAN assignment should follow a similar pattern as Hyper-V virtual switch assignment in that, if there are different classifications of service within the SAN, it should be reflected within the fabric. As discussed in earlier sections, all physical Fibre Channel equipment must support NPIV. Hardware vendors must also provide drivers that display the Designed for Windows logo for all Fibre Channel CNAs, unless drivers are provided in-box. If zoning that is based on physical Fibre Channel switch ports is part of the fabric design, all physical ports must be added to allow for virtual machine mobility scenarios across hosts in the fabric cluster. Although virtual machines can support iSCSI boot, boot from SAN is not supported over the virtual Fibre Channel adapter and should not be considered as part of workload design. Storage Infrastructure The key attribute of the storage infrastructure for the converged pattern is the use of a traditional SAN infrastructure, but it is accessed through an Ethernet transport for the fabric, fabric management, and workload layers. As discussed earlier, the primary reason to adopt or maintain this design is to preserve existing investments in a SAN infrastructure or to maintain the current level of flexibility and capabilities that a SAN-based storage-array architecture provides, while consolidating to a single Ethernet network infrastructure. For Hyper-V failover-cluster and workload operations in a converged infrastructure, the fabric components utilize the following types of storage: Operating system: Non-shared physical boot disks (direct-attached storage or SAN) for the fabric management host servers (unless using boot from SAN) Cluster witness: Shared witness disk or file share to support the failover cluster quorum Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV): One or more shared CSV LUNs for virtual machines (Fibre Channel or iSCSI), as presented by the SAN Guest clustering [optional]: Shared Fibre Channel, shared VHDX, or shared iSCSI LUNs for guest clustering Figure 34 provides a conceptual view of this architecture for the converged pattern. Figure 43 Converged architecture pattern As outlined in the overview, fabric and fabric management host controllers require sufficient storage to account for the operating system and paging files. In Windows Server 2012 R2, we recommend that virtual memory be configured as “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives.”
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