Solved: NetApp SANtricity (E-Series) for hyper cluster

Giulian · ‎2025-12-04

Hello,
We have a NetApp SANtricity (E-Series) array and are planning to use it as storage for a Hyper-V cluster (Windows Server).

Has anyone implemented this setup before?
What are your experiences regarding performance and stability?
Are there any best practices or pitfalls to be aware of (iSCSI, MPIO, CSV, etc.)?

I know Ontap is better for this usage but can i have real good performances for VM on production environnement ?

Thanks for your feedback and recommendations!

elementx · ‎2025-12-05

1) I haven't, but I'd try. I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't work well.

2) Should be the same as Windows bare metal server.

3) SCSI-3 reservations are supported so it should just work as per Windows setup guidelines, I think.

Some things I'd watch out for:

- If your setup is HDD, obviously it won't be "fast" for small IO, so you can limit IO queue depth on Windows iSCSI initiator or NIC. For Hyper-V, as I recall you can also set limits on VMs (e.g. if you have 20 NL-SAS disks, that'd be around 1500 IOPS, so set a low queue depth (4, for example) and on VMs set an IOPS limit per VM (e.g. with 30 VMs, set 100 IOPS limit on each, if you assume 50% would run at max while others are idle). Watch perf counters: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/performance-tuning/role/hyper-v-server/detecting-virtualized-environment-bottlenecks#s...

- You can use jumbo frames for iSCSI, but you need room for Hyper-V overheads, so use iSCSI frame size slightly smaller than E-Series NIC has (e.g. if E is 9000, try 8800 on iSCSI client NIC)

- As I recall you can't use multiple VLANs on E iSCSI, so use default VLAN

View solution in original post

elementx · ‎2025-12-05

1) I haven't, but I'd try. I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't work well.

2) Should be the same as Windows bare metal server.

3) SCSI-3 reservations are supported so it should just work as per Windows setup guidelines, I think.

Some things I'd watch out for:

- If your setup is HDD, obviously it won't be "fast" for small IO, so you can limit IO queue depth on Windows iSCSI initiator or NIC. For Hyper-V, as I recall you can also set limits on VMs (e.g. if you have 20 NL-SAS disks, that'd be around 1500 IOPS, so set a low queue depth (4, for example) and on VMs set an IOPS limit per VM (e.g. with 30 VMs, set 100 IOPS limit on each, if you assume 50% would run at max while others are idle). Watch perf counters: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/performance-tuning/role/hyper-v-server/detecting-virtualized-environment-bottlenecks#s...

- You can use jumbo frames for iSCSI, but you need room for Hyper-V overheads, so use iSCSI frame size slightly smaller than E-Series NIC has (e.g. if E is 9000, try 8800 on iSCSI client NIC)

- As I recall you can't use multiple VLANs on E iSCSI, so use default VLAN

elementx

Bonus content: ODX is supported by default (it's in TFM) for the offload of data movement among different E-Series volumes. Simple module for automation of certain Day 1+ management tasks (currently mostly reporting, i.e. read-only queries) can be found at https://github.com/scaleoutsean/santricity-powershell.