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| How Storage Foundation manages storage for virtual machines | ||
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| Prev | Introduction to Storage Foundation solutions for Hyper-V environments | Next |
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| How Storage Foundation manages storage for virtual machines | ||
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| Prev | Introduction to Storage Foundation solutions for Hyper-V environments | Next |
In virtual environments, managing the storage that is used by guests is not an easy task. Typically, the guest is separated from the physical storage. Storage Foundation (SFW) provides several solutions to make it easier to manage storage requirements for virtual machines.
With Hyper-V, guests reside on virtual hard disk (VHD) files, which in turn are located on the volumes that reside on physical storage. Direct access to those volumes or the LUNs they reside on is not available from the guest. The VHD files are provisioned by the parent on storage that is accessed by the parent partition. As storage needs change in the guest VHDs, they may require additional space. It can be difficult to effectively manage space requirements or to relocate a guest from one storage location to another.
Running SFW in the parent provides the following storage management solutions for VHDs:
The SFW storage migration feature enables you to view and select VMs to migrate to different storage.
For details on using SFW for migrating VM to new storage, see the following:
SFW allows for dynamically growing the volumes that host the guest VHDs. As SFW allows for growth of all volume types, the volumes that host the VHD files can be configured for performance by RAID-5, striping or mirrored-stripes.
In environments that use thin provisioned storage, SFW can be configured to automatically grow volumes based on user- defined space thresholds and policies that set the amount to grow the volumes by and whether that growth should be restricted or unrestricted. This counters the effects of NTFS uncontrolled growth tendencies in a thin environment, by allowing the creation of small volumes on the thin storage, which grows automatically as needed, triggering corresponding growth in the hardware.
As a host-level volume manager, SFW also allows for mirroring volumes across arrays and, with its support for dynamic disk operations in a cluster, the creation of stretch or campus clusters.