Dell PowerVault MD3200 Series White Paper

Also see for PowerVault MD3200 Series: Manual Update Rack Installation Instructions Owner's manual Support Matrix

Contents

Dell PowerVault MD3200 Series White Paper Manual pdf 12 page image

Planning for Hyper-V: PowerVault™ MD3200 and MD3200i Series of ArraysPage 10To choose the service level to use, examine the needs of the applications connected to the storagearray. For instance, if you have your servers set up to iSCSI boot, or are using virtualization to “hide”the storage array (and the guest OS is booting off a C: drive that is actually on the storage array),select EF because the data must get to the server and, if there is latency, the server locks up. On theother hand, if you might want all of your traffic coming in from the worldwide web, set to the lowestpossible class of AF so that the service level does not affect your critical data.Considerations for Storage and Network Adapters(PowerVault™ MD3200 and MD3200i Storage Arrays)When planning for the network configuration, make sure that you have at least two network adaptersassigned for your virtual machine (VM) traffic. If you are planning to add MS-Exchange, MS-SQL, MS-SharePoint, or a similar configuration to your VMs, use two dedicated network connections for each ofthose applications. For example, if you have a file server, MS-Exchange, and a SQL server running onVMs, you should have six network connections (two for MS-Exchange, two for the SQL server, one forthe file server, and one for managing the Hyper-V server). For clustering, have two additional networkconnections for the cluster heartbeat.Connecting the Dell PowerVault MD3200 Storage ArrayThe connection to the Dell PowerVault MD3200 storage array is SAS based. Error! Reference sourcenot found. shows how the SAS storage cabling is configured.Figure 3. Dell PowerVault MD3200 Storage System (SAS) Cabling ConfigurationConnecting the Dell PowerVault MD3200i Storage ArrayFor the iSCSI-based Dell PowerVault MD3200i storage array, you must have two NICs for I/O to thestorage array for each server. Set up the management ports (out-of-band) for managing the MD3200istorage array because they are required for the initial configuration. For best performance when