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Administration best practices
23 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Windows Server Best Practices | 680-042-007
With SC Series, Replay Manager can be used to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to
automate the process of obtaining application-consistent snapshots in Microsoft environments. For more
information on Replay Manager, see section 4.7.
3.10.2 Recovery with SC Series snapshots
Server volumes, including boot-from-SAN volumes, can be recovered to a previous point by creating View
Volumes from crash-consistent snapshots. Snapshots can also be used to create duplicate instances of
servers or server data in an isolated environment at the same or a different location when replication between
SC Series arrays is used.
3.10.3 Create a test environment with SC Series snapshots
SC Series snapshots can be used to quickly create test or development environments that mirror a production
environment. When volumes are replicated to another location, this makes it very easy to do this at a different
location. PowerShell integration can help automate a recurring workflow that involves View Volumes. See
section 4.9 for more information on the PowerShell SDK offered with SC Series.
Note: Duplicate servers or data created from View Volumes should be completely isolated to avoid the risk of
data corruption or server name/IP conflicts.
3.11 TRIM/Unmap
Windows Server 2012 and newer automatically identifies thin-provisioned LUNs and will reclaim disk space in
real time when data is deleted or removed from a volume. TRIM allows this space to be automatically
reclaimed by the SAN. Reclaimed space is returned to the disk pool on the SC array as free space, so it is
available for other volumes. Without TRIM, this reclaimed space would show as free in Windows, but would
continue to show as allocated on the SC array. TRIM is enabled by default in Windows Server 2012 and
newer.
Dell EMC introduced support for TRIM/Unmap in SCOS 6.3.1. With the TRIM/Unmap feature, the DSM server
agent is no longer required to recover deleted disk space from server volumes and return it to the disk pool to
be used elsewhere. The server agent can still be installed on Windows Server 2012 server and newer, but the
disk space recovery feature in the agent will be disabled by default because it is no longer needed.
TRIM/Unmap is supported with the following types of physical volumes and disks:
• SC Series volumes mapped to physical Windows Server 2012 and newer hosts using iSCSI, Fibre
Channel, or SAS
• SC Series volumes mapped to guest VMs as pass-through or direct-attached disks using iSCSI, SAS,
or virtual Fibre Channel
- SAN volumes must be basic disks and formatted as NTFS
- Other formats such as FAT and ReFS do not support TRIM/Unmap
- SC Series volumes mapped to Windows Server 2012 and newer Hyper-V nodes as cluster
shared volumes (CSVs)
- CSVs must be basic disks and formatted as NTFS
- CSVs formatted with ReFS do not support TRIM/Unmap