Installing Hyper-V Part 2
Okay it took a bit longer then desired, however here is the first actual part concerning installation of Hyper-V.
So what is actually the most important component when designing a Hyper-V environment? Just like VMware it is actually the storage. Of course you could start out with local storage but quite frankly; that is not anything near a modern infrastructure anymore. One could argue that for a test/home environment local storage is sufficient but I don't quite agree with that: Most challenges in a server virtualization implementation are actually storage and backup based. Although it pretty much extends the scope of my inital blog series plan I find it important enough to discuss it so here it goes!
Central vs Local storage
Local storage of course limits you in flexibility and expandability. However on my demo laptop I am forced to use local storage while keeping my VM's synchronized between my Laptop and my regular environment. How I will synchronize this I will get back to while blogging about replication and site recovery.
Apart from a portable demo environment there is no justification to implement server virtualization with Hyper-V on local storage.
Central Storage Iscsi or Fiber?
It will be obvious that a fiber based storage solution is a bit above my budget for home usage thus that answers that question quite easily. However what about production environments?
Fiber is the way to go
When taking variables as price, performance and proven technology into account a fiber based SAN is the way to go. Fiber will obviously give you a maximum throughput of 4 Gb/s whilst Iscsi is limited to 1 Gb. Indeed, 10 Gb ethernet is available yet not quite stable in relation with Iscsi yet. The storage market is rapidly moving (like the virtualization market) however and I do expect that 2009 or 2010 will be the definite breakthrough of stable ISCSI based storage networks. If I would be an IT manager and I would have to make the decision now, I would simply play safe and choose fiber.
For test and small production environments ISCSI is however an excellent low cost choice.
Hardware or software based storage solution?
Basically this is a no brainer; production and business environments will use something like HP EVA, DELL Equallogic or Netapp based hardware. In principle all fine solutions that differentiate on matters way beyond the scope of this Blog and storage expertProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
will be way more valuable to consult concerning this. What I want to talk about are the software based solutions on the market available today since that will be the material I'll be working with. There are a couple of options: