Administrator Guide

Live Volume support for Microsoft Windows/Hyper-V
78 Dell EMC SC Series: Synchronous Replication and Live Volume | CML1064
9.10.1 SC Series requirements for LV-AFO for Microsoft
The SC Series storage requirements to support LV-AFO for Microsoft are as follows:
• A pair of SC Series arrays that support Live Volume (SCv2000 Series is not supported)
- Similarly configured SC Series arrays are recommended to ensure uniform performance
- Dissimilar SC Series arrays are supported but performance will be no greater that the lower
performing of the two SC Series arrays
• Replication and Live Volume feature licenses applied to both SC Series arrays
• SCOS 7.1 or newer on both SC Series arrays; both SC Series arrays should be running matching
SCOS versions
• At least 1 Gbps of available bandwidth between the SC Series arrays for replication and proxied data
(iSCSI or FC)
• No more than 5 to 10 ms of latency between the SC Series arrays and the host servers (higher
latencies may be tolerable for some workloads but generally anything over 10 ms will start to be
noticeable)
• An instance of the Dell Storage Manager at a third site to act as a tiebreaker/quorum witness for LV-
AFO
- DSM version 2016 R2 or newer is required to support LV-AFO for Microsoft; DSM 2018 or newer
is required to support Live Volume ALUA.
- DSM can be configured as a physical host or as a VM.
- DSM supports running from a cloud-based service if the customer does not have third site.
- This DSM instance should be dedicated to a tiebreaker/quorum witness role (run other DSM
instances at the primary or secondary site for day-to-day management, monitoring, and
reporting).
- No more than 200 ms of round-trip latency is required between the DSM tiebreaker and each SC
Series array.
9.10.2 Microsoft requirements for LV-AFO
Note: The LV-AFO feature requires Windows Server 2012 or newer.
The Microsoft requirements to support LV-AFO for Microsoft are as follows:
• Physical server clusters running Windows Server 2012 and newer
• Physical Hyper-V clusters running Windows Hyper-V 2012 or newer
- Uniform or non-uniform host mappings to SC Series storage mappings are supported.
- Fibre Channel or iSCSI transports are supported.
- It is a best practice to avoid presenting Fibre Channel and iSCSI paths concurrently to the same
volume (mixed transports) because it can result in unpredictable behavior with Microsoft
clustering in some LV-AFO failure scenarios.
• Guest VM clusters running Windows Server 2012 and newer, that use the following methods for
guest VM clustering:
- Shared virtual hard disks with VHDX format (host servers require Hyper-V 2012 R2 in this case)
- In-guest iSCSI (guest VMs running on either Hyper-V or VMware hosts are supported)
- Physical raw device mappings (pRDMs) on VMware 5.5 or 6.0 hosts