Managing Storage in a Hyper-V Environment

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Best Practices for Managing Storage in a Hyper-V Environment

Server configurations based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization solution are increasing in popularity and are a default configuration choice now for many organizations. Setup and configuration of environments based on Hyper-V offer many advantages to information technology departments, including the ability to more accurately size deployed VMs based on their actual workload requirements.

Virtualized environments also allow hardware to be more effectively utilized because a range of VMs can be deployed onto a single hardware server. Assuming each VM is not in the red zone on a consistent basis in terms of CPU, memory, or storage utilization, multiple VMs on a single machine used for a wide variety of operations allows the underlying hardware to be used in a more uniform, predictable manner.



When new organizations first begin configuring a new Hyper-V virtual machine, one of the aspects that is often ignored is data storage. Planning and configuration of Hyper-V storage can be considerably different than that used by traditional dedicated servers.

On a standard server, the options are fairly well understood and usually involve direct configuration and connection of actual physical storage devices. These devices come in the form of hard drives that are directly connected to the server, storage area network (SAN) devices that usually combine some form of software and hardware interface, or network attached storage (NAS) devices that hold a cluster of hard drives and may be accessed by a number of servers on a single network segment. Once the operating system has been configured to address these storage interfaces, your system is ready to go and the drive volumes may be immediately accessed.

Hyper-V storage configuration, however, is somewhat different and reliant primarily on the configuration of the storage volumes in the Hyper-V configuration options. The most common storage configuration option is what Hyper-V refers to as Virtual Hard Disks, or VHDs.

VHDs show up to the virtual machine OS as a storage volume just like any storage volume on a standard dedicated server would, however VHDs are actually large (or very large, based on your configuration) files stored down on the physical file system, most commonly side-by-side with the VM’s own VHD file (collocating related VHD files together makes them easy to locate and manage, which is always a good thing).

One obvious advantage to this simplistic VHD storage approach is that an entire disk volume can be easily backed up to some other device by simply making a copy of the single file. VHDs Recovery options for individual file segments on normal physical drives are obviously more advanced than the current virtualization software tools so this would be one drawback to the VHD approach. The other set of drawbacks to VHDs are all the same drawbacks that drive the sale of iSCSI or SAN storage systems…sometimes you need more capacity, throughput, failover, or sheer storage space than a single virtual or physical volume can provide.



In the event that you need to go this route, Hyper-V does support what is known as a «pass-through disk». Pass-through disks connect via a iSCSI or Fibre Channel connection to a SAN and, once in that environment, physical storage on those disks is written in the native raw format, just as if it were written from a dedicated server. This has the disadvantage of not being in the same encapsulated portable file format that VHDs utilize but also allows individual portions of the file system to be backed up and managed in a customized fashion. It is also possible to directly attach a SAN storage disk using iSCSI to a VM in a model known as a «direct-attached disk». Direct-attached disks connect directly through the VM and not through the underlying host, which makes configuration and relocation of the disks simpler should a VM also need to be relocated.

Storage planning and configuration is an important part of every Hyper-V effort and it is important to understand how your options differ from a standard dedicated server environment. On the stage of configuration and managing you can use different tools, which can help you to do it easily. For example, StarWind iSCSI SAN is designed to manage shared storages and is qualified to support Hyper-V environments. With StarWind, Microsoft Windows Hyper-V administrators get a scalable, cost-effective and easy-to-use Windows-based iSCSI SAN that fully protects your Microsoft Windows Hyper-V environment in the event of a catastrophic failure.

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