VHD file placement on an iSCSI SAN.

Question

I am wondering about VHD file placement when creating a virtual machine. I had created my 3 VHD OS files on the SAN itself and then created and added Pass Through disks to the virtual machines once I logged into each vm. Recently I was told that I should
have created the vhd files on the physical host and then mapped the Pass Though disks on the SAN to each vm. Is that the correct way to do this? I thought the pupose of the SAN was to move your virtuals including the OS VHD files onto the SAN itself? Am I
missing the point or am I being given bad information?
Thanks
Marc

Answer 1

I am wondering about VHD file placement when creating a virtual machine. I had created my 3 VHD OS files on the SAN itself and then created and added Pass Through disks to the virtual machines once I logged into each vm. Recently I was told that I should
have created the vhd files on the physical host and then mapped the Pass Though disks on the SAN to each vm. Is that the correct way to do this? I thought the pupose of the SAN was to move your virtuals including the OS VHD files onto the SAN itself? Am I
missing the point or am I being given bad information?
Thanks
Marc
1) You create a LUN with your SAN (that's vendor-specific and you know better what to do).
2) You connect to that LUN with all your hypervisor initiators (configure MPIO etc). That's trivial.
3) You create a CSV on top of this LUN. See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2009/02/19/9433146.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610692.aspx
4) You place your VMs on CSV.
5) When you need more space for VMs you just grow corresponding VHD(x). See:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn282286.aspx
That's all... Good luck!
StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS