Saturday, June 1, 2013

Hyper-V 3.0's virtual Fibre Channel feature explained

Organizations that have invested in a SAN typically have physical servers that connect directly to SAN storage through a Fibre Channel connection. Previously, such servers were considered to be poor candidates for virtualization because hypervisors lacked an efficient way to link the virtual machine (VM) to SAN storage. The new virtual Fibre Channel (FC) feature in Microsoft's Hyper-V 3.0 solves this problem by making it possible to link a virtual machine directly to SAN storage.

To use virtual Fibre Channel, a VM must be running on Hyper-V 3.0 and its guest operating system must run Windows Server 2008 or higher. Likewise, the host server must be equipped with a host bus adapter (HBA) that supports N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), and the NPIV feature must be enabled.

If an organization plans to use live migration for a VM that uses virtual Fibre Channel, any node that could potentially host the VM must have identical FC hardware. Furthermore, the HBA must be equipped with two World Wide Names (WWNs) to facilitate the live-migration process.

In this video, Brien Posey, a Microsoft MVP with two decades of IT experience, walks users through the process of creating a virtualized SAN and then establishing virtual Fibre Channel connectivity from the VM to SAN storage.

BIO: Before becoming a freelance technical writer, Brien Posey worked as a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the nation's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox.


View the original article here

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