It's the holiday season so EMC is delivering presents early this year with not one, not two but three new documented solutions for Hyper-V! As seen through these papers below, EMC continues to invest in testing and documenting Hyper-V solutions as well as work with third-party industry leaders to showcase EMC solutions for Hyper-V. And this is just the start of some more surprises that will continue throughout the holiday season!
Let's take a look at some of these new technical documented solutions:
EMC Business Continuity for Microsoft Hyper-V Enabled by EMC Symmetrix VMAX and SRDF/CE
This technical white paper shows how to setup and perform Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Live Migration across physical locations using EMC SRDF Cluster Enabler and EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage arrays. Cluster Enabler is EMC technology that extends a cluster across geographic locations and provides automated failover and failback of Microsoft clusters. This whitepaper documents how to set up clustering, Cluster Enabler and perform Live Migrations between sites including instructions on modifying specific settings as well as screen shots throughout the process. Also included is the use of EMC's Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) for viewing the virtual machine to physical storage relationship.
Windows IT Pro: Essentials Guide to Microsoft Virtualization
The Essentials Guide to Microsoft Virtualization takes a look at how virtualization of physical servers onto a single host can introduce new challenges specifically with reliability, server growth and performance problems. This white paper looks at how EMC technologies address each of these problems including products such as:
- EMC Powerpath Virtual Edition (VE) for improved availability with multi-pathing and load balancing as well as improved security through encryption.
- EMC Networker and Replication Manager for VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) backups of Hyper-V virtual machines.
- EMC VPLEX which provides storage federation or access to a single LUN across physical locations and is complimentary to Hyper-V Live Migration for highly available VMs.
- EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) and Powershell cmdlets for improved management of Hyper-V VMs when using EMC storage.
- EMC Replication technologies including Mirrorview, RecoverPoint and SRDF for array based replication remote protection of VMs.
While it isn't a detailed technical paper, it is an excellent overview of EMC's technology to assist you when managing a Microsoft virtual infrastructure.
ESG's Lab Validation Report is a third party's perspective on the large scale highly-available Hyper-V configuration EMC has been testing with EMC's Symmetrix VMAX. I wrote about this solution on a previous blog post and on a guest blog post on the Microsoft Windows Virtualization blog site. In summary, EMC has been building and testing one of the largest Hyper-V environments in the world by creating a 16 node cluster configuration with Hyper-V containing over 1000 virtual machines. The goal of this test has been to understand the scalability limits of Hyper-V and to develop best practices for large scale deployments of Hyper-V for EMC's customers. What we found is that Hyper-V continues to meet all performance expectations as we added additional workloads showing that it can meet the performance requirements of very large virtual implementations. We also developed best practices for similar deployments including the use of clones to help improve deployment times when creating new virtual machines using templates over the LAN. By using EMC's TimeFinder software and replicas for creating new VMs, we were able to deploy virtual machines 27 times faster than creating new VMs using templates over the LAN! Below is a diagram of EMC's test configuration:
The configuration included:
- 16 multi-core servers with 8 processor cores and 96GB of memory each
- Windows 2008 R2 with Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs)
- 6 engine EMC Symmetrix VMAX array
- 702 450GB 15k RPM drives
- EMC TimeFinder and Powerpath software
As you can see, EMC continues to invest in Hyper-V solutions and this is the start to many more exciting things to come! If you have any feedback on these solutions or suggestions for what you'd like to see from us, leave me a comment as I'd love to hear from you!
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