White Papers

Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series and Citrix XenServer | H18237

Key features of the ME4 Series include the following:

• Simple, customer-installable design

• Intuitive web-based GUI and CLI tools for system configuration and management

• All-inclusive feature-licensing model

• Support for all-flash, spinning, and hybrid drive configurations

• Linear and virtual disk group and pool configuration options

• Thin-provisioning with virtual disk groups for storage efficiency, along with storage tiering for intelligent

rea time data placement for hot and cold data

• A variety of RAID levels and hot spare configurations, including distributed sparing with the new ADAPT

RAID option

• Full support for multipath I/O (MPIO) with up to eight front-end (FE) ports per array (four per controller

head)

• Active-active controller configuration that permits asymmetrical logical unit access (ALUA) aware hosts

to automatically designate MPIO FE paths as optimal or non-optimal.

• FE transport options including 12Gb SAS, 8Gb/16Gb Fibre Channel (FC), and 1Gb/10Gb iSCSI

• Support for mixed transport environments (FC and iSCSI)

• Up to nine back-end (BE) expansion enclosures can be added to each ME4 Series array with 12Gb

SAS to expand drive capacity

• Support for up to 336 drives with up to 4 petabytes (PB) raw capacity in the ME4084 array

• Direct-attached storage (DAS) support for FE ports (SAS, FC, and iSCSI)

• Storage area network (SAN) support for FE ports connected to FC and iSCSI switches (FE SAS

supports DAS only)

• Scheduled and on-demand volume snapshots with rollback and refresh options

• Asynchronous replication over FC or iSCSI to another ME4 Series array for DR protection.

Note: Most of these features work seamlessly in the background, regardless of the platform. In most cases, the

default settings for these features work well with Citrix Xen Server or at least serve as good configuration

starting points. This document highlights additional configuration or tuning steps that may enhance

performance, usability, or other factors.