Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 Best Practices Manual
Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000
Family Best Practices with Hyper-V
Best Practices Guide
By Rick Andersen and Lisa Pampuch
April 2009
Summary
Increasingly, businesses are turning to virtualization to achieve several important objectives, including increase
return on investment, decreasing, total cost of operation, improving operational efficiencies, improving
responsiveness and becoming more environmentally friendly.
While virtualization offers many benefits, it also brings risks that must be mitigated. The move to virtualization
requires that IT administrators adopt a new way of thinking about storage infrastructure and application
deployment. Improper deployment of storage and applications can have catastrophic consequences due to the
highly consolidated nature of virtualized environments.
The Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family of storage systems is best-in-class for Windows Server
2008 Hyper-V environments. It is ideal for business that are planning new deployments in existing or new
environments, and for business considering virtualizing their servers and need a storage system that increases
reliability and performance and reduces total cost of operations.
This paper is intended for use by IT administrators who are planning storage for a Hyper-V deployment. It
provides guidance on how to configure both the Hyper-V environment and a 2000 family storage system to
achieve the best performance, scalability and availability.
Contributors
The information included in this document represents the expertise, feedback and suggestions of a number of
skilled practitioners. The authors recognize and sincerely thank the following contributors and reviewers of this
document:
• Mark Adams, Product Marketing
• Robert Burch, Advanced Technical Consultants
• Alan Davey, Storage Platforms Product Management
• Rob Simmons, Application Solutions
• Eric Stephenson, Hardware and Alliances
• Bin Bin Zhang, Global Services Technical Support
Table of Contents
Hitachi Product Family.........................................................................................................................................................1
Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 Family Features .................................................................................................. 1
Hitachi Storage Navigator Modular 2 Software ........................................................................................................ 3
Hitachi Performance Monitor Software..................................................................................................................... 3
Hyper-V Architecture............................................................................................................................................................4
Windows Hypervisor ................................................................................................................................................ 5
Parent and Child Partitions....................................................................................................................................... 5
Integration Services ................................................................................................................................................. 5
Emulated and Synthetic Devices.............................................................................................................................. 6
Hyper-V Storage Options..................................................................................................................................................... 6
Disk Type ................................................................................................................................................................. 6
Disk Interface ........................................................................................................................................................... 7
I/O Paths .................................................................................................................................................................. 7
Basic Hyper-V Host Setup...................................................................................................................................................8
Basic Storage System Setup...............................................................................................................................................9
Fibre Channel Storage Deployment ......................................................................................................................... 9
Storage Provisioning .............................................................................................................................................. 15
Hyper-V Protection Strategies........................................................................................................................................... 16
Backups ................................................................................................................................................................. 16
Storage Replication................................................................................................................................................ 17
Hyper-V Quick Migration ........................................................................................................................................ 17
Hitachi Storage Cluster Solution ............................................................................................................................ 17
Hyper-V Performance Monitoring ..................................................................................................................................... 18
Windows Performance Monitor .............................................................................................................................. 18
Hitachi Performance Monitor Feature .................................................................................................................... 19
Hitachi Tuning Manager Software .......................................................................................................................... 19
Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage
2000 Family Best Practices
with Hyper-V
Best Practices Guide
By Rick Andersen and Lisa Pampuch
Increasingly, businesses are turning to virtualization to achieve several important objectives:
• Increase return on investment by eliminating underutilization of hardware and reducing administration
overhead
• Decrease total cost of operation by reducing data center space and energy usage
• Improve operational efficiencies by increasing availability and performance of critical applications and
simplifying deployment and migration of those applications
In addition, virtualization is a key tool companies use to improve responsiveness to the constantly changing
business climate and to become more environmentally friendly.
While virtualization offers many benefits, it also brings risks that must be mitigated. The move to virtualization
requires that IT administrators adopt a new way of thinking about storage infrastructure and application
deployment. Improper deployment of storage and applications can have catastrophic consequences due to the
highly consolidated nature of virtualized environments.
The Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family of storage systems is best-in-class for Windows Server
2008 Hyper-V environments. It offers a robust storage solution that reduces setup and management costs and
eliminates performance bottlenecks. This is accomplished through the use of the 2000 family’s advanced pointto-point SAS-based architecture for concurrent back-end I/O capacity and symmetric active-active front-end
architecture that dynamically spreads I/O workloads across resources and allows I/O through any path. The
2000 family is ideal for business that are planning new deployments in existing or new environments, and for
business considering virtualizing their servers and need a storage system that increases reliability and
performance and reduces total cost of operations.
This paper is intended for use by IT administrators who are planning storage for a Hyper-V deployment. It
provides guidance on how to configure both the Hyper-V environment and a 2000 family storage system to
achieve the best performance, scalability and availability.
Hitachi Product Family
Hitachi Data Systems is the most trusted vendor in delivering complete storage solutions that provide dynamic
tiered storage, common management, data protection and archiving, enabling organizations to align their
storage infrastructures with their unique business requirements.
Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 Family Features
The Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family provides a reliable, flexible, scalable and cost-effective
modular storage system for Hyper-V. The 2000 family of modular storage systems is ideal for demanding
applications that require enterprise class-like performance, capacity and functionality.
1
The 2000 family is the only midrange storage product with symmetric active-active front-end and dynamic
back-end controller architecture that provides integrated, automated hardware-based front-to-back-end I/O load
balancing. This ensures I/O traffic to back-end disk devices is dynamically managed, balanced and shared
equally across both controllers, even if the I/O load to specific logical units (LUs) is skewed. Storage
administrators are no longer required to manually define specific affinities between LUs and controllers,
simplifying overall administration. The 2000 family’s architecture takes full advantage of native OS multipathing
capabilities, thereby eliminating mandatory requirements to implement proprietary multipathing software.
No other midrange storage product has an advanced serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drive interface. The new
point-to-point back-end design virtually eliminates I/O transfer delays and contention associated with Fibre
Channel arbitration. It also provides significantly higher bandwidth and I/O concurrency and isolates any
component failures that might occur on back-end I/O paths.
Flexibility
• Choice of Fibre Channel and iSCSI server interfaces or both
• Resilient performance using LUs that can be configured to span multiple drive trays and back-end paths
• Choice of high-performance SAS and low-cost SATA disk drives
• Lowered costs using SAS or SATA drives that can be intermixed in the same tray
• Support for all major open systems operating systems, host bus adapters (HBAs) and switch models from
major vendors
Scalability
• Ability to add capacity, connectivity and performance as needed
• Concurrent support of large heterogeneous open systems environments using up to 2048 virtual ports with
host storage domains and 4096 LUs
• Ability to scale capacity to 472TB
• Ability to scale performance to more than 900K IOPS
• Seamless expansion due to data-in-place upgrades from Adaptable Modular Storage 2100 to Adaptable
Modular Storage 2300 and to Adaptable Modular Storage 2500
• Large-scale disaster recovery and data migration using integration with Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V
and Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM
• Complete lifecycle management solutions within tiered storage environments
Availability
• Outstanding performance and non-disruptive operations using Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing Controller
• 99.999% data availability
• No single point of failure
• Hot swappable major components
• Dual-battery backup for cache
• Non-disruptive microcode updates
• Flexible drive sparing with no copy back required after a RAID rebuild
• Host multipathing capability
• In-system SQL Server and Exchange backup and snapshot support through Windows Volume Shadow Copy
Service
• Remote site replication
• RAID-5, RAID-1, RAID-1+0 and RAID-0 (SAS drives) support
2
• RAID-6 dual parity support for enhanced reliability when using large SATA and SAS drives
• Hi-Track
®
Monitor support
Performance
• No performance bottlenecks in highly utilized controllers due to Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing Controller
• Point-to-point SAS backplane with a total bandwidth of 96 gigabits per second (Gbps) and no overhead from
loop arbitration
• Full duplex 3Gbps SAS drive interface that can simultaneously send and receive commands or data on the
same link
• Up to 32 concurrent I/O paths provide up to 9600 megabytes per second of total system bandwidth
• 4Gbs host Fibre Channel connections
• Cache partitioning and cache residency to optimize or isolate unique application workloads
Simplicity
• Simplified RAID group placement using SAS backplane architecture
• Highly intuitive management software that includes easy-to-use configuration and management utilities
• Command line interface and command control interface (CCI) that match GUI functionality
• Seamless integration with Hitachi storage systems, managed with a single set of tools using Hitachi Storage
Command Suite software
• Consistency among most Hitachi software products whether run on Hitachi modular storage systems or
Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ family models
Security
• Role-based access to Adaptable Modular Storage management systems
• Ability to track all system changes with audit logging
• Ability to apply system-based write once, read many (WORM) data access protection to logical volumes to
provide regulatory-compliant protection
• Encrypted communications between management software and storage system using SSL and TSL
• Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) compliant maintenance ports
Hitachi Storage Navigator Modular 2 Software
Hitachi Storage Navigator Modular 2 software is the integrated interface for Adaptable Modular Storage 2000
family firmware and software features. Use it to take advantage of all of the 2000 family’s features. Storage
Navigator Modular 2 software provides both a Web-accessible graphical management interface and a CLI to
allow ease of storage management.
Storage Navigator Modular 2 software is used to map security levels for SAN ports and virtual ports and for
inter-system path mapping. It is used for RAID-level configurations, for LU creation and expansion, and for
online volume migrations. It also configures and manages Hitachi replication products. It enables online
microcode updates and other system maintenance functions and contains tools for SNMP integration with
enterprise management systems.
Hitachi Performance Monitor Software
Hitachi Performance Monitor software provides detailed, in-depth storage performance monitoring and
reporting of Hitachi storage systems including drives, logical volumes, processors, cache, ports and other
resources. It helps organizations ensure that that they achieve and maintain their service level objectives for
performance and availability, while maximizing the utilization of their storage assets. Performance Monitor
software’s in-depth troubleshooting and analysis reduce the time required to resolve storage performance
problems. It is an essential tool for planning and analysis of storage resource requirements.
3
Hyper-V Architecture
Microsoft® Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based virtualization technology from Microsoft that is integrated into
Windows Server 2008 x64 editions of the operating system. Hyper-V allows a user to run multiple operating
systems on a single physical server. To use Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008, enable the Hyper-V role on the
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 server.
Figure 1 illustrates Hyper-V architecture.
Figure 1. Hyper-V Architecture
The Hyper-V role provides the following functions:
• Hypervisor
• Parent and child partitions
• Integration services
• Emulated and synthetic devices
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