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other non-Hyper-V hosts. This prevents the Hyper-V I/O from affecting or being affected by other applications
and LUs on the same RAID group and makes management simpler.
Follow these best practices:
•
Create and dedicate RAID groups to your Hyper-V hosts.
•
Always present LUs with the same H-LUN if they are shared with multiple hosts.
•
Create VHDs on the LUs as needed.
•
Monitor and measure the capacity and performance usage of the RAID group with Hitachi Tuning Manager
software and Hitachi Performance Monitor software.
Monitoring and measuring the capacity and performance usage of the RAID group results in one the following
cases:
•
If all of the capacity offered by the RAID group is used but performance of the RAID group is still good, add
RAID groups and therefore more capacity. In this case, consider migrating the LUs to a different RAID group
with less performance using Hitachi Modular Volume Migration or Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager.
•
If all of the performance offered by the RAID group is used but capacity is still available, do not use the
remaining capacity by creating more LUs because this leads to even more competition on the RAID group
and overall performance for the child partitions residing on this RAID group is affected. In this case, leave the
capacity unused and add more RAID groups and therefore more performance resources. Also consider
migrating the LUs to a different RAID group with better performance.
In a real environment, it is not possible to use 100 percent of both capacity and performance of a RAID group,
but the usage ratio can be optimized by actively monitoring the systems and moving data to the appropriate
storage tier if needed using Hitachi Modular Volume Migration or Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager. An
automated solution using these applications from the Hitachi Storage Command Suite helps to reduce the
administrative overhead and optimize storage utilization.
Hyper-V Protection Strategies
A successful Hyper-V deployment requires careful consideration of protection strategies for backups, disaster
recovery and quick migration.
Backups
Regularly scheduled backups of the Hyper-V servers and the data that resides on the child partitions under
Hyper-V are an important part of any Hyper-V protection plan. With Hyper-V, the backup and protection
process involves both the Hyper-V parent partition and the child partitions that execute under Hyper-V, along
with the applications that reside within the child partition.
When protecting child partitions, two protection strategies are available. You can create application-aware
backups of each child partition as if they are hosted on individual physical servers, or you can backup the
parent partition at a point in time, which then creates a backup of the child partitions that were executing on the
parent partition.
When backing up the parent partition, it's important to keep the state of the physical server in mind. For
example, if a backup of the parent partition is created while two child partitions are executing applications, the
backup is a point-in-time copy of the parent and the child partitions. Any applications that are executing in the
child partitions are unaware that a backup occurred. This means that applications such as Exchange or SQL
cannot freeze writes to the databases, set the appropriate application checkpoints, or flush the transaction logs.
Best practice is to perform application-aware backups in the child partitions.
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