Windows Server 2019 (Hyper-V), NetApp SolidFire and Mellanox SN2010
Did you know that 90% of FC SAN users still don’t know they’d be better off with IP SAN (iSCSI)? All right, I made this up and while that may not be completely true, I think it’s pretty close.
In any case, NetApp SolidFire supports iSCSI and this video shows how easy it is to use it with Microsoft Windows Hyper-V clusters.
The first minute goes through several (unofficial) networking options with NetApp HCI H410C compute nodes (which come with 4 x 10/25 ports and go nicely with NetApp H-Series switches (Mellanox SN2010).)
Due to various limitations in my environment the network configuration was … unusual, but the point is with NetApp H410C you get 100G (4 x 25G) to use and adjust any way you please, you get plenty of throughput and it’s likely also more cost effective than 2 x Fibre Channel + 2 x Ethernet.
After that we create a SolidFire volume and turn it into a Cluster Shared Volume.
Finally, we deploy a Linux VM and test Live Migration using existing Virtual Machine. I didn’t have time to verify (had to wipe the entire system hours after I completed installation) but after I posted this video it occured to me that Live Migration network traffic may not have registered in Perfmon because it was set to SMB3 and may have used RoCE (which I had also configured but did not inspect).
Edit: correct – one of the non-Mellanox switches the Hyper-V hosts were connected to had DCB and RDMA enabled, and the NICs connected to that switch (192.168.10.0/24) auto-configured themselves for RDMA.
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