Solved: Best practice for Hyper-V Cluster with storage Netapp

rocaflqu · ‎2024-10-24

Hello, good afternoon,

I need to create a hyper-v cluster but I have doubt in the following:
- create disk as iscsi or smb3
- in storage netapp create volume or lun

Thank you very much in advance
Best regards

ChanceBingen · ‎2024-10-25

To add to what has already been said, iSCSI vs. SMB3 really depends on your particular use case and scale and whether you have an ASA or unified system.

For ASA, you need to use iSCSI. For unified, I like to use SMB3 for very large-scale deployments with many data mobility requirements. Don't forget that you can take advantage of SMB multichannel for improved performance.

For a basic Hyper-V cluster, I would probably just use iSCSI with cluster shared volumes and create your VHDX files on that. Even for larger clusters I would probably still stay with block protocols.

If you plan on using NetApp Shift to flex VMs between VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, you will need to use SMB3 for your Hyper-V storage, at least temporarily, as Shift requires NAS storage.

One other point that you must consider is how are you integrating that with other software and services?

For example, Commvault supports NetApp integrated snapshots and snapmirror with Hyper-V, but only with iSCSI and FCP, not with SMB3.

I know this isn't a targeted response, but you get the idea. As with most things in IT, the answer is always, "it depends".

View solution in original post

jcolonfzenpr · ‎2024-10-24

All your doubts can be solved by reading the docs.

https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/netapp-solutions/hyperv/hyperv-deploy.html

- create disk as iscsi or smb3:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/virtual-machine-storage-file-vs-block-part-2-smb-vs-iscsi-vs-nvme-of-in-hyper-v/

- in storage netapp create volume or lun

It depends on selected protocols SMB - Volume, ISCSI - Lun

For enterprise scenarios I always prefer block storage!

Hope this helps!

Jonathan Colón | Blog | Linkedin

rocaflqu · ‎2024-10-25

@jcolonfzenpr

thank you very much for your answer and your help, I will proceed to read the documentation.

Regards

ChanceBingen · ‎2024-10-25

To add to what has already been said, iSCSI vs. SMB3 really depends on your particular use case and scale and whether you have an ASA or unified system.

For ASA, you need to use iSCSI. For unified, I like to use SMB3 for very large-scale deployments with many data mobility requirements. Don't forget that you can take advantage of SMB multichannel for improved performance.

For a basic Hyper-V cluster, I would probably just use iSCSI with cluster shared volumes and create your VHDX files on that. Even for larger clusters I would probably still stay with block protocols.

If you plan on using NetApp Shift to flex VMs between VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, you will need to use SMB3 for your Hyper-V storage, at least temporarily, as Shift requires NAS storage.

One other point that you must consider is how are you integrating that with other software and services?

For example, Commvault supports NetApp integrated snapshots and snapmirror with Hyper-V, but only with iSCSI and FCP, not with SMB3.

I know this isn't a targeted response, but you get the idea. As with most things in IT, the answer is always, "it depends".

rocaflqu · ‎2024-10-25

@ChanceBingen

Thank you very much for your answer and your help, it was very complete and very useful, I will look for the best alternative based on your comments.
Regards

ChanceBingen · ‎2024-10-25

Microsoft announced that Windows 2025 will introduce an NVMe/TCP software initiator sometime next year. I'm pretty excited to see how well it performs. It may become the ideal solution.