A FlashArray can be connected to a Hyper-V host via Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI. This section will cover both.
As noted above, RDMA cannot be used to connect to a FlashArray from a Hyper-V host. Therefore, RDMA cannot be used for storage communication. It is recommended to consider RDMA to improve SMB performance when Hyper-V VM virtual disks are placed on an SMB share, such as in the case of a Scale Out File Server.
Multiple Paths to FlashArray
Both FC and iSCSI support the Multipath IO (MPIO) feature of Windows Server. This feature allows a Hyper-V host to communicate to and from storage arrays across multiple paths to provide improved performance, load balancing, and resiliency for storage connections. Each physical HBA should have ports connected via redundant switching to different controller interconnects in the storage array. FlashArray has multiple interconnects on each redundant controller. An example of multiple hosts connected with active multipathing to a FlashArray as shown.
A physical host should be connected to more than a single switch to ensure redundancy in and out of the host. These redundant switches are used to connect each physical server and devices like shared storage in a redundant manner. Physical interfaces, either network adapters or Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), or both, connect the physical server to the switches, and should be physically redundant within the host. One or more logical virtual switches at the Hyper-V layer act as an intermediary to pass through and route VM traffic to the physical adapter(s).
The VM’s vNIC or virtual Fibre Channel Adapter (vHBA) is then bound to a virtual switch port to complete the end-to-end connection to the physical network. A number of redundancy and performance-oriented factors need to be reviewed to ensure the network architecture is optimal for Hyper-V and storage.