Users Guide

Storage Solutions Guide 11
Disk Location
When determining VHD and/or passthrough disk location for VM(s), the
following options are available:
• Internal storage
• External storage
• SMB/CIFS Share
Internal Storage
Internal storage encompasses disks that reside within the server chassis.
Internal disks can be presented directly to the server or they can be managed
by a RAID controller to provide disk aggregation and fault tolerance. Because
the boot volume has a file system on it, using it as a passthrough disk is not an
option. VHDs can be placed on the boot volume, however this is not a
recommended configuration. If internal storage is used, additional disks
within the system should be utilized as either passthrough disks or formatted
for storage of VHDs.
External Storage
External storage encompasses disks that do not reside within the server
chassis. External disks can be used as either passthrough disks or VHDs while
offering storage expansion and providing additional feature support in
Hyper-V. There are two major categories of external storage:
HOST-BASED RAID CONTROLLER WITH EXTERNAL STORAGE ENCLOSURE —
Provides additional storage for a server through an internal RAID controller
and an external storage enclosure (commonly referred to as a JBOD). For
Hyper-V, using a host-based RAID controller with external storage enclosure
does not provide additional feature support over internal storage.
STORAGE ARRAYS — Contains iSCSI, FC, and SAS arrays that have built-in
storage controllers required for supporting shared storage between multiple
servers (see Figure 4). With support for shared storage, storage arrays provide
the potential to support a Microsoft Failover Cluster. The failover cluster is
utilized by Hyper-V to support highly available virtual machines and virtual
machine migration (see the Dell High Availability Solutions Guide for
Microsoft Hyper-V at www.dell.com/hyper-v).