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SC Series snapshots and Hyper-V
34 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices | CML1009
5. Create a new VM. Make a copy of the gold VHD and place it in the desired location to serve as the
boot volume for the VM.
6. Rename the VHD to reflect the name of the VM or its purpose, and then attach the VHD to the new
VM as the boot volume.
7. Power on the VM and customize the VM as needed.
Note: Although this is not as space efficient, it is a very quick and easy way to provision new VMs. To learn
more about how to use SCVMM to provision VMs from a gold image this is space efficient, see the Dell EMC
SC Series Storage and SMI-S Integration with Microsoft SCVMM configuration guide.
3.5.1 Gold images and preserving balanced SC Series controllers
When a new volume on an SC Series storage appliance consisting of two controller heads is created and
mapped to a host server, cluster, or VM, volume ownership is assigned to one controller head or the other as
the primary owner. As additional volumes are created and mapped to servers from the SC Series array,
controller ownership is alternated automatically in a round robin fashion so that both controllers stay evenly
balanced with each controller owning roughly the same number of volumes. Administrators can override this
default behavior and assign volumes to the controller head of their choice when mapping them to servers, but
this is usually not required unless there is a storage controller imbalance.
During SC Series maintenance that requires staggered controller head reboots, ownership of all volumes is
temporarily moved to one controller while the other controller is rebooted. Once both controllers have been
rebooted, they are rebalanced using the Dell Storage Manager client.
When using gold images to deploy new host servers, there is a limitation to be aware of that can inadvertently
cause the controller heads to become imbalanced. Since a View Volume is created from a snapshot of the
source volume, the SC Series controller that owns the source volume will also own all View Volumes created
from it. If a large number new hosts are deployed from the same gold image, this can result in one controller
head owning many more volumes than the other controller head, creating an imbalance.
Use the Dell Storage Manager client to view the summary information for a volume that is the gold source to
see which controller owns it. Change to Tree View under the Snapshots tab in the Dell Storage Manager
client to see a graphical representation of the relationship between the gold image source volume and any
View Volumes created from it.