Planning The Sas Direct-Attach Installation With The Dell Powervault Md3200 And Md3220 Storage Arrays; Direct-Attach Storage With Sas Considerations; Figure 1. Dell Powervault Md3200 Storage Array Configuration - Dell PowerVault MD3200 Series White Paper

Planning for Hyper-V: PowerVault™ MD3200 and MD3200i Series of Arrays
Planning the SAS Direct-Attach Installation with the
Dell PowerVault™ MD3200 and MD3220 Storage Arrays
The Dell PowerVault™ MD3200 storage array, with SAS host interface connectivity, can connect with up
to four servers for high availability. The configuration that you choose depends on the number of
servers you have, whether you are connecting to servers or a cluster-node, and the level of data
redundancy that your configuration requires.

Direct-Attach Storage with SAS Considerations

Redundancy
Redundancy is established by installing separate data paths between the server and the storage array,
in which each path connects to the different RAID controller modules. Redundancy protects the server
from losing access to data in the event of data path failure because both RAID controllers can access all
of the disks in the storage array. Figure 1 shows redundant, high-availability cabling configuration for
two hosts. This configuration is a best practice for Microsoft Hyper-V installations.
Note Use two dual-ported 6Gb host bus adapters (HBAs), and connect to one port from each
of these HBAs to improve availability. With this configuration, a cable or a SAS HBA
could fail, and the access to the data is still guaranteed.
Dell PowerVault MD3200 Storage Array Configuration
Figure 1.
RAID Level
Choose an appropriate RAID level based on your applications. RAID 1 or higher provides some level of
redundancy that is useful in the case of failed physical disks. Each RAID level works best with certain
applications. Consider the RAID level when you configure the Dell PowerVault MD3200 storage array.
Page 4