70-247 Series: Part 16

Configure the Fabric (27%)

Configure the storage fabric

Introduction

Virtualised workloads required storage to meet capacity and performance requirements. VMM can recognise both local and remote storage. Local storage is disks directly attached to the hypervisor hardware. Remote storage is storage that is detached from the server and can be scaled by upgrading the storage hardware.

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 can be used to:

  • Discover storage - VMM can automatically discover storage including storage arrays, pools, logical units (LUNs), disks, volumes and virtual disks
  • Classify storage - Create friendly names to expose a simplified storage model
  • Provision storage - VMM can create new logical units from available capacity. Logical units can be provisioned from any of the following:
  • From available capacity
  • By creating a writeable snapshot
  • By creating a clone of a logical unit
  • Allocate storage - Available LUNs can be allocated to defined host groups. Typically you will allocate storage at the host group level before assigning the storage to hosts.
  • Decommission - VMM can decommission storage when it is no longer required

    • Alright, now for a few gotchas before we get started:

  • Storage automation is only available with Hyper-V hosts
  • The SMI-S provider is not supported to be installed on the VMM management server

    • To work with storage, you will be working in the Fabric workspace

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    Classify Storage

    Expand the storage node, right click Classifications and Pools and select Create Classification

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    Create your classifications, these names should be non-technical, friendly names

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    This is what I ended up with:

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  • Bronze = SATA
  • Silver = SAS
  • Gold = SSD

    • Discover storage

    Expand the storage node, right-click providers and select Add Storage Devices

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    Enter in the IP address (or the hostname) port, optional run as account and click next.

    Note: Port 5988 is the non-SSL port

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    In the example below, you can see I am using Starwind's Free iSCSI SAN. The three selectable storage pools are different configurations within StarWind's iSCSI SAN SMI-S provider. By default:

  • ConcretePool_Storage_Flat is a Disk image file
  • ConcretePool_Storage_HA is a HA disk image
  • ConcretePool_Storage_ThinProvisioned is a thin provisioned image file

    • All three reside on SSD so I have assigned them the Gold classification.

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    Select LUN creation method

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    Provision storage

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    Allocate storage to a host group

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