Storage Infrastructure

The storage infrastructure includes the storage system, host storage connections, and switches. It will need to be designed to meet the Dynamic Datacenter’s requirements in the following areas:

• Capacity, to provide the required storage space for the data and backups and forecasted growth.
• Performance delivery, to support the required number of IOps (Input/Output per second) and throughput, including forecasted growth.
• Fault tolerance, to provide the desired level of protection against hardware failures. 
• Manageability, to provide a high degree of platform self-management.

The physical storage systems that can be used with a server that runs Hyper-V to store the virtual machines are:

• Direct-attached storage, such as Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), SCSI, USB, or Firewire drives.
• SANs using Internet SCSI (iSCSI), Fibre Channel, or SAS technologies.

Network-attached storage is not supported for Hyper-V, although the VMs are able to access data stored on network-attached storage as a regular file share.

We recommend Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 as centralized storage system for Hyper-V.