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Administration best practices
18 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Windows Server Best Practices | 680-042-007
available on the array. Overprovisioning is possible because only actual data consumes space on the array.
This translates to much better storage utilization.
Host Volumes
used
free
used
free
used
free
additional
volumes

Available SAN space
used
used
used
free
Better storage utilization with thin provisioning
The risk with overprovisioning is running the array out of physical space inadvertently, even though individual
volumes from the perspective of host servers might still report free capacity.
To mitigate risks when an SC Series array is overprovisioned, consider these best practice recommendations:
• Set up SC Series monitoring with threshold alerts so that if a percent-full threshold is exceeded for
any given disk tier or disk pool (such as 90 percent), an alert is generated with enough lead time to
allow for remediation
• Configure notification settings so administrators receive SC Series alerts automatically
Although it is much easier with modern Windows Server OS versions to expand boot-from-SAN and data
volumes by using native Windows tools and without down time, it is still generally preferable to size a volume
initially so that it will not need to be expanded later. Avoiding disk expansion is particularly helpful with cluster
volumes mapped to multiple hosts, and cluster shared volumes (CSV) that hold dynamically expanding virtual
hard disks.
3.6 Guest VMs with in-guest iSCSI and virtual Fibre Channel
SC Series storage supports in-guest iSCSI to present block storage volumes directly to guest VMs. The setup
and configuration are essentially the same as for a physical host server, except that the VM is using virtual
hardware.
Guest VMs also support virtual Fibre Channel (vFC) with SC Series storage if all the components in the fabric
support N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). Support for NPIV is typical with modern FC hardware.
For more information, see the
Dell SC Series Storage and Microsoft Hyper-V and Dell SC Series Storage and
Microsoft Multipath I/O best practices guides.
3.7 SC Series and server clustering
When mapping shared volumes (quorum disks, cluster disks, or cluster shared volumes) to multiple hosts,
make sure that the volume is mapped to all nodes in the cluster using a consistent LUN number. Leverage
host groups on the SC Series array to simplify the task of mapping a consistent LUN number to multiple
hosts.