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Boot-from-SAN for Hyper-V
42 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices | CML1009
6 Boot-from-SAN for Hyper-V
SC Series storage supports boot-from-SAN when hosts are configured with FC or iSCSI cards that also
support boot-from SAN. In Microsoft environments, boot-from-SAN is supported with standalone and
clustered Hyper-V hosts and nodes. Some of the pros and cons of booting from local disk or from a SAN are
detailed below.
Boot-from-SAN advantages:
• SC Series snapshots of boot-from-SAN volumes provide for quick recovery.
• Replicate boot-from-SAN volumes to another SC Series array at a remote location for enhanced
disaster recovery (DR) protection when both sites use similar hardware for server hosts.
• SC Series gold image boot-from-SAN volumes can be leveraged to quickly provision new Hyper-V
host servers.
Boot-from-local-disk advantages:
• Offline SAN maintenance will not affect the host. Critical roles such as an AD domain controller, DNS
and DHCP may need to remain online during offline SAN maintenance or unplanned outages.
However, Live Volume (with or without automatic failover) can be used to migrate workloads to
another SC array when more than one SC Series array is available.
• The Dell Storage Manager Data Collector/Unisphere™ for SC Series Data Collector can remain
online regardless of the state of SC Series array.
6.1 Configure Hyper-V hosts to boot-from-SAN
To learn more about how to configure Windows Server Hyper-V hosts to boot from SAN, see the Dell EMC
SC Series and Microsoft MPIO best practices guide.