Dell Dell PowerVault MD32X0 Implementation Manual - Page 10

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PowerVault™ MD32X0, MD32X0i, and MD36X0i Series of Storage Arrays: Implementing Hyper-V

The Module Disk Storage Manager comes with the device specific module (DSM) for Microsoft multi-path

I/O (MPIO). MPIO provides load-balancing between the two ports of one RAID controller module. For

best performance, make sure that load-balancing is enabled and active. Load-balancing allows you to

use up to 4Gb/s for each virtual disk on the MD32X0i or MKD36X0i storage array.

For more information about the MD32X0i storage array, go to this website:

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_MD3200i?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

&dgc=IR&cid=14054&lid=407200

Need MD36X0i link

For more information about how to plan for an IP SAN network, refer to the IP SAN Best-Practices at

this website:

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/public/white_papers/IP-SAN-BestPractice-WP.pdf

You can choose one of these load-balance policies to optimize I/O performance.

Round Robin with Subset

The round-robin with subset I/O load-balance policy routes I/O requests in rotation, to each available

data path to the RAID controller module that owns the virtual disks. This policy treats all data paths to

the RAID controller module that owns the virtual disk equally for I/O activity. Data paths to the

secondary RAID controller module are ignored until ownership changes. The basic assumption for the

round-robin policy is that the data paths are equal. With mixed-host support, the data paths might

have different bandwidths or different data transfer speeds.

Least Queue Depth with Subset

The least queue depth with subset policy is also known as the least I/Os, or least requests, policy. This

policy routes the next I/O request to a data path that has the least outstanding I/O requests queued.

For this policy, an I/O request is simply a command in the queue. These types of command, or the

number of blocks that are associated with the command, are not considered. The least queue depth

with subset policy treats large block requests and small block requests equally. The data path selected

is in the path group of the RAID controller module that owns the virtual disk.

The least path weight with subset policy assigns a weight factor to each data path to a virtual disk. An

I/O request is routed to the path with the lowest weight value to the RAID controller module that owns

the virtual disk. If more than one data path to the virtual disk has the same weight value, the round-

robin with subset path selection policy is used to route I/O requests between paths with the same

weight value.

From the desktop of the host, right-click the My Computer icon, and select Manage to open the

Computer Management dialog. Select Disk Management to view the list of virtual disks that are

attached to the host. Right-click the virtual disk on which you want to set the load- balance policy, and

select Properties. From the MPIO tab, select the load-balance policy that you want to set for this

virtual disk.

After you have installed the Windows Server® 2008 Release 2 operating system on the servers, you can

enable the Hyper-V role on those servers.

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