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SC Series snapshots and Hyper-V
32 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices | CML1009
3.5 Leverage SC Series to create gold images
With SC Series storage, an administrator can create gold images to accelerate and simplify the process of
deploying new servers. Gold images can be used to deploy the following:
• Host servers (when using boot-from-SAN)
• Guest VMs that use pass-through disks for boot disks (although use of pass-through disk is not
recommended)
• Guest VMs that boot from a sysprepped virtual hard disk as the gold image source
Using gold images provides the following benefits:
• Faster server provisioning with minimal reconfiguration.
• Better SAN utilization. When a host or VM is provisioned from a gold image, only new data consumes
SAN space. Data that has not changed is read from the gold image source volume.
• Disk tiering and Data Progression optimize data placement for best performance and utilization.
The steps to configure a Windows Server or Hyper-V boot-from-SAN gold image are as follows:
1. Create and map an SC Series volume to a host server that is configured to boot-from-SAN. For more
information on boot-from-SAN see the
Dell EMC SC Series and Microsoft MPIO best practices guide.
2. Build your base OS image, install roles and features, and fully configure and patch it. This will
minimize the changes that have to be made to each new server that is deployed using the gold
image.
3. Once the OS is fully staged, power down the OS to put it into a consistent state and then take a
manual SC Series snapshot of the volume and set this snapshot to never expire. This represents the
point in time prior to running Sysprep. If the OS image needs to be updated in the future (for example,
to apply patches), this snapshot can then be used to create an updated gold image source without
having to stage the OS from scratch.