Users Guide

14 Storage Solutions Guide
Figure 5. Disk Interface (With an Attached Fibre Channel Storage Array)
Integration Services
By default, a guest OS only supports emulated IDE devices. Emulated IDE
devices typically require a large amount of processor overhead to handle the
device emulation and do not utilize the high-speed VMBus. To utilize the
VMBus and therefore increase I/O performance, Hyper-V supports synthetic
SCSI devices and an enhanced mode for IDE devices through the installation
of Integration Services within the guest OS. For existing IDE emulated
devices, a filter driver is loaded when Integration Services is installed to allow
for use of the VMBus. SCSI devices are only supported as synthetic devices
and therefore require that Integration Services be installed. In addition, SCSI
device support is guest OS specific.
The following guest operating systems support SCSI devices:
• Windows Server 2008 (x64)
• Windows Server 2008 (x86)
• Windows Server 2003 (x64) SP2
• Windows Server 2003 (x86) SP2
• SLES 10 (x64) SP2
• SLES 10 (x86) SP2