Virtual Fibre Channel lifting Hyper-V performance

Why do I need virtual Fibre Channel?

The new features included with Windows Server-Hyper-V allow virtual Fibre Channel adapters to provide administrators with the possibility of load virtualization for high storage requirements. This new version reduces complexity and limitations compared to the previous Hyper-V version manager needing to increase a pass-through disk linked to a volume and mount it directly onto a virtual machine on a Hyper-V host. In general, most virtual machines do not need to use virtual Fibre Channel, but it allows you to virtualize the load that you used not to use in your virtual infrastructure.

Virtual machines that consume large amounts of storage: In the past, production-oriented virtual machines needed to use fixed or fully expanded disks. But fixed disks need to provide all the VHD/VHDX disk space on expensive storage area networks (Sans). Virtual Fibre Channel Connectivity now allows you to better leverage the features of your SAN storage (such as automating the provisioning and reducing the number of duplicate blocks). Now you can provide a few terabytes of disk space without having to allocate all the space for the server at once.

Virtual machines requiring high storage performance: Using Passthrough disks is the only way to optimize disk performance before Windows Server 2012. Performance reduction is acceptable for some workloads, but there are some limitations to pass-through disks-especially if they lack real real-time migration capabilities. Virtual disk channels get rid of restrictions on implementing migrations by allowing local use of multipath software to coordinate data migrations between Hyper-V cluster nodes without disconnecting from the disk.

Cluster of virtual machines for application high availability: fault-tolerant mechanisms have become a key feature of Hyper-V. If one node in the cluster fails, all virtual opportunities migrate to other surviving nodes. This mechanism works at the operating system level, but after failover, many applications cannot be restarted. Virtual machine clusters using shared Fibre Channel to connect to shared storage allows applications to have fault-tolerant capabilities like the virtual machine cluster node. Using virtual Fibre Channel connectivity disks allows you to get the most out of your physical server configuration and achieve the best performance.

How to create Hyper-V virtual Fibre Channel sans

Pointing a virtual machine directly to the SAN can reduce the complexity of the virtual host and reduce the limit on the pass-through disk. However, there are some host issues that need to be considered before the implementation begins.

The firmware and drivers for the host bus adapters (HBAs) on all nodes in the cluster and the LAN on the motherboard chip are guaranteed to be the latest version. Standardization is the key to maintaining stability.

You also need to ensure that the Hba/lom card supports N_port ID virtualization (NPIV) and that the feature is enabled on the card. This allows Hba/lom to efficiently assign the world Wide Name (WWN) or World Wide ID to each virtual disk channel adapter within the virtual machine. The following video shows how to enable NPIV using Emulex Onecommand Manager.

After installing the driver and firmware correctly on the host and enabling the NPIV, you need to define a virtual Fibre Channel SAN on the host. Because system Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 does not support configuring this feature, you need to perform these steps on each host using the Hyper-V manager. The important thing to keep in mind during the configuration process is that similar to configuring virtual switches, it is critical to name the exact names on all Hyper-V hosts if you want the virtual machines to reduce configuration changes after migrating to another host. This standard is necessary if you are about to use a host cluster in Hyper-V, a virtual machine using a virtual Fibre Channel adapter, or you are ready to use the real-time migration functionality between individual hosts.

Considerations for using virtual Fibre Channel connection disks

Hyper-V VSS writer does not allow virtual Fibre Channel attached disks to be backed up using host-based backups. For virtual machines that use this type of disk, you need to install a backup agent in the virtual machine and disable all backup software. From the backup point of view, you need to treat this virtual machine as a physical server.

You also need to implement fiber-optic areas with the network and storage groups at both the fibre-exchange layer and the SAN storage layer.

Using new virtual Fibre Channel to virtualize more workloads can save a lot of overhead, which is good news for CEOs and CIOs.

There are some technical differences to consider about other virtual opportunities for using virtual Fibre Channel connection disks, but the backup and fibre zone methods mimic the practices in the physical environment unless the physical server takes up space. Now you can increase the disk input/output speed and reduce the data center space occupied by the virtual machine. Do you need to decide whether it is meaningful to pursue small differences in these virtualized environment strategies? What is the role of using virtual Fibre Channel connection disks? Is there a potential risk?