Drives must provide port association. Windows depends on drive enclosures to provide capabilities such as drive-slot identification and visual drive indications (commonly implemented as drive LEDs). Windows matches a drive in an enclosure with SES-3 identification capabilities through the port address of the drive. The computer hosts can be separate from drive enclosures or integrated into drive enclosures. Multiport drives must provide symmetric access. Drives must provide the same performance for data-access commands and the same behavior for that arrive on different ports as they provide when those commands arrive on the same port. Drives must provide persistent reservations. Windows can use physical disks to form a storage pool. From the storage pool, Windows can define virtual disks, called storage spaces. A failover cluster can create high availability for a pool of physical disks, the storage spaces that they define, and the data that they contain. In addition to the standard Windows Hardware Compatibility Test qualification, physical disks should pass through the Microsoft Cluster Configuration Validation Wizard. In addition to the drives, the following enclosure requirements exist: Drive enclosures must provide drive-identification services. Drive enclosures must provide numerical (for example, a drive bay number) and visual (for example, a failure LED or a drive-of-interest LED) drive-identification services. Enclosures must provide this service through SCSI Enclosure Service (SES-3) commands. Windows depends on proper behavior for the following enclosure services. Windows correlates enclosure services to drives through protocol-specific information and their vital product data page 83h inquiry association type 1. Drive enclosures must provide direct access to the drives that they house. Enclosures must not abstract the drives that they house (for example, form into a logical RAID disk). If they are present, integrated switches must provide discovery of and access to all of the drives in the enclosure, without requiring additional physical host connections. If possible, multiple host connections must provide discovery of and access to the same set of drives. Hardware vendors should pay specific attention to these storage drive and enclosure requirements for SAS configurations when they are used in conjunction with the Storage Spaces feature in Windows Server 2012 R2. Nearline SAS (NL-SAS) Nearline SAS (NL-SAS) drives deliver the larger capacity benefits of enterprise SATA drives with a fully capable SAS interface. The physical properties of the drive are identical to those of traditional SATA drives, with a rotational speed of 7,200 RPM and average latency of around
Note the following list provides some examples, and it does not contain all network access types. For instance, some implementations would include a dedicated backup network. Network Access Type Purpose of the network-access type Network-traffic requirements Recommended network access Storage Access storage through SMB, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel. (Fibre Channel does not need a network adapter.) High bandwidth and low latency. Usually dedicated and private access. Refer to your storage vendor for guidelines. Virtual machine access Workloads that run on virtual machines usually require external network connectivity to service client requests. Varies. Public access, which could be teamed for link aggregation or to fail over the cluster. Management Managing the Hyper-V management operating system. This network is used by Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). Low bandwidth. Public access, which could be teamed to fail over the cluster. Cluster and Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) Preferred network that is used by the cluster for communications to maintain cluster health. Also used by CSV to send data between owner and non-owner nodes. If storage access is interrupted, this network is used to access the CSV or to maintain and back up the CSV. The cluster should have access to more than one network for communication to help make sure that it is a high availability cluster. Usually low bandwidth and low latency. Occasionally high bandwidth. Private access.
Virtual Machine Storage Dynamically Expanding Virtual Hard Disks Dynamically expanding VHDs provide storage capacity as needed to store data. The size of the VHD file is small when the disk is created, and it grows as data is added to the disk. The size of the VHD file does not shrink automatically when data is deleted from the virtual hard disk; however, you can use the Edit Virtual Hard Disk Wizard to make the disk more compact and decrease the file size after data is deleted. Fixed-Size Disks Fixed-size VHDs provide storage capacity by using a VHDX file that is in the size that is specified for the virtual hard disk when the disk is created. The size of the VHDX file remains fixed, regardless of the amount of data that is stored. However, you can use the Edit Virtual Hard Disk Wizard to increase the size of the VHDX, which in turn increases the size of the VHDX file. By allocating the full capacity at the time of creation, fragmentation at the host level is not an issue. (Fragmentation inside the VHDX itself must be managed within the guest.) Differencing Virtual Hard Disks Differencing VHDs provide storage to help you make changes to a parent VHD without changing the disk. The size of the VHD file for a differencing disk grows as changes are stored to the disk. Pass-Through Disks Pass-through disks allow Hyper-V virtual machine guests to directly access local disks or SAN LUNs that are attached to the physical server, without requiring the volume to be presented to the host server. The virtual machine guest accesses the disk directly (by using the GUID of the disk) without having to utilize the file system of the host. Given that the performance difference between fixed disk and pass-through disks is now negligible, the decision is based on manageability. For instance, a disk that is formatted with VHDX is hardly portable if the data on the volume will be very large (hundreds of gigabytes), given the extreme amounts of time it takes to copy. For a backup scheme with pass-through disks, the data can be backed up only from within the guest. When you are utilizing pass-through disks, no VHDX file is created because the LUN is used directly by the guest. Because there is no VHDX file, and there is no dynamic sizing or snapshot capability.
Figure 24 Microsoft Azure poster Note To download a full-size version of this poster, see in the Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft Azure Services Microsoft Azure Compute Services Virtual Machines Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines enable you to deploy a Windows Server or Linux image in the cloud. You can select images from a gallery or provide your customized images. Cloud Services Microsoft Azure Cloud Services remove the need to manage server infrastructure. With Web and Worker roles, Cloud Services enable you to quickly build, deploy and manage modern applications. Web Sites Microsoft Azure Web Sites enables you to deploy web applications on a scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure. You can quickly scale up or scale automatically to meet your application needs. Mobile Services Microsoft Azure Mobile Services provides a scalable cloud backend for building applications for Windows Store, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML or JavaScript. You can store data in the cloud, authenticate users, and send push notifications to your application within minutes. Microsoft Azure Data Services Storage Microsoft Azure Storage offers non-relational data storage including Blob, Table, Queue and Drive storage. SQL Database Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a relational database service that enables you to rapidly create, extend, and scale relational applications into the cloud. SQL Reporting
StorSimple StorSimple, a Microsoft company, is the leading vendor of cloud-integrated storage for Microsoft Azure. StorSimple solutions combine the data-management functions of primary storage, backup, archive, and disaster recovery with Microsoft Azure integration, enabling customers to optimize storage costs, data protection, and service agility. With its unique capability, StorSimple automatically protects and rapidly restores production data by using Microsoft Azure Storage. The StorSimple solution combines a number of storage technologies, including Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN), snapshot, backup, deduplication, and compression with storage services that are offered by cloud service providers. StorSimple solutions seamlessly integrate advanced SAN technologies (such as SSDs, SAS, automated storage tiering, deduplication, compression, and encryption) with cloud storage to reduce the storage footprint significantly and lower capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenditures (OpEx). StorSimple provides a strong solution for storage tiers that is integrated tightly with Microsoft Azure Storage. StorSimple optimizes usage of different cost or performance storage options that are based automatically on data usage. This opens a large number of architecture scenarios. Note StorSimple is currently a hardware storage appliance that is available from Microsoft. The appliance acts as an iSCSI Target Server for on-premises servers and provides several tiers of storage (by using SSD and SAS) while natively integrating with Microsoft Azure Storage. StorSimple consolidates primary storage, archive, backup, and disaster recovery through seamless integration with the cloud. By combining StorSimple software and a custom-designed enterprise-grade hardware platform, StorSimple solutions provide high performance for primary storage and enable revolutionary speed, simplicity, and reliability for backup and recovery. Note that in the figure below that CiS refers to cloud integrated storage. Figure 27 Hybrid storage Infrastructure consolidation. StorSimple solutions consolidate primary storage, archives, backup, and disaster recovery through seamless integration with the cloud. Simpler, faster backup and recovery. StorSimple cloud-based snapshots enable revolutionary speed, simplicity, and reliability for backup and recovery. Users can achieve up to 100 times faster data recovery versus traditional backup methods used in the cloud.
must be enabled within the virtual machine workload itself. Virtual SAN assignment should follow a similar pattern as Hyper-V virtual switch assignment in that, if there are different classifications of service within the SAN, it should be reflected within the fabric. As discussed in earlier sections, all physical Fibre Channel equipment must support NPIV. Hardware vendors must also provide drivers that display the Designed for Windows logo for all Fibre Channel CNAs, unless drivers are provided in-box. If zoning that is based on physical Fibre Channel switch ports is part of the fabric design, all physical ports must be added to allow for virtual machine mobility scenarios across hosts in the fabric cluster. Although virtual machines can support iSCSI boot, boot from SAN is not supported over the virtual Fibre Channel adapter and should not be considered as part of workload design. Storage Infrastructure The key attribute of the storage infrastructure for the converged pattern is the use of a traditional SAN infrastructure, but it is accessed through an Ethernet transport for the fabric, fabric management, and workload layers. As discussed earlier, the primary reason to adopt or maintain this design is to preserve existing investments in a SAN infrastructure or to maintain the current level of flexibility and capabilities that a SAN-based storage-array architecture provides, while consolidating to a single Ethernet network infrastructure. For Hyper-V failover-cluster and workload operations in a converged infrastructure, the fabric components utilize the following types of storage: Operating system: Non-shared physical boot disks (direct-attached storage or SAN) for the fabric management host servers (unless using boot from SAN) Cluster witness: Shared witness disk or file share to support the failover cluster quorum Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV): One or more shared CSV LUNs for virtual machines (Fibre Channel or iSCSI), as presented by the SAN Guest clustering [optional]: Shared Fibre Channel, shared VHDX, or shared iSCSI LUNs for guest clustering Figure 34 provides a conceptual view of this architecture for the converged pattern. Figure 43 Converged architecture pattern As outlined in the overview, fabric and fabric management host controllers require sufficient storage to account for the operating system and paging files. In Windows Server 2012 R2, we recommend that virtual memory be configured as “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives.”