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Table of contents
3 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices | CML1009
Table of contents
Revisions............................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................................................. 2
Table of contents ................................................................................................................................................................ 3
Executive summary ............................................................................................................................................................. 5
1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................... 6
1.1 SC Series ............................................................................................................................................................ 6
1.2 Microsoft Server Hyper-V ................................................................................................................................... 6
1.3 Supported versions ............................................................................................................................................. 7
1.4 Best practices overview ...................................................................................................................................... 8
1.5 General best practices for Hyper-V .................................................................................................................... 8
2 Optimize Hyper-V for SC Series................................................................................................................................... 9
2.1 Hyper-V integration services .............................................................................................................................. 9
2.2 Hyper-V guest VM generations ........................................................................................................................ 11
2.2.1 Convert VMs to a newer generation ................................................................................................................. 12
2.3 Virtual hard disks .............................................................................................................................................. 13
2.3.1 Virtual hard disk format ..................................................................................................................................... 13
2.3.2 Virtual hard disk type ........................................................................................................................................ 14
2.3.3 Virtual hard disks and thin provisioning with SC Series storage ...................................................................... 16
2.3.4 Overprovisioning with dynamic virtual hard disks ............................................................................................. 17
2.4 Present SC Series storage to Hyper-V ............................................................................................................. 17
2.5 Transport options .............................................................................................................................................. 18
2.5.1 SC Series and front-end SAS support for Hyper-V .......................................................................................... 18
2.5.2 Multiple transports ............................................................................................................................................ 18
2.6 MPIO best practices ......................................................................................................................................... 19
2.7 Guest VMs and in-guest iSCSI and virtual Fibre Channel disks ...................................................................... 19
2.8 Guest VMs and direct attached storage ........................................................................................................... 20
2.9 Guest VMs and pass-through disks.................................................................................................................. 21
2.10 SC Series arrays and cluster server objects .................................................................................................... 22
2.11 SC Series LUN limits for larger Hyper-V clusters ............................................................................................. 23
2.12 Volume design considerations for SC Series ................................................................................................... 24
2.13 Offloaded data transfer ..................................................................................................................................... 24
2.14 Disable automount ............................................................................................................................................ 25
2.15 Placement of page files .................................................................................................................................... 25
2.16 Placement of Active Directory domain controllers ............................................................................................ 26