Metro Volume Now Supports Microsoft with PowerStoreOS 4.0!
Fri, 02 Aug 2024 16:48:50 -0000
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Metro Volume Now Supports Microsoft with PowerStoreOS 4.0!
Dell Technologies is pleased to announce that with the release of PowerStoreOS 4.0, Microsoft environments can take full advantage of PowerStore Metro Volume features. All the Metro Volume features offered in earlier PowerStoreOS releases (initially for VMware) now extend to Microsoft (and Linux too!). Metro Volume now supports Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) and Hyper-V clusters.
This is great news for Dell Technologies customers who use SC Series Live Volume. You can confidently modernize with PowerStore and take advantage of Live Volume-like functionality with PowerStore Metro Volume.
What is Metro Volume?
A Metro Volume is an active-active stretched volume. It is comprised of two synchronous volumes that span two PowerStore clusters within the same datacenter, same building, or within metro distance. The two synchronous volumes are presented as a single Metro Volume to hosts and applications. Uniform and non-uniform host connectivity is supported.
Metro Volume provides many benefits to Microsoft environments:
- Increased workload mobility.
- Cross-site load balancing.
- Fast recovery at a remote site within metro distance.
- Disaster avoidance for planned downtime.
Metro Volume supports:
- Long-term servicing channel (LTSC) versions of Windows Server 2016 (build 14393.2395 and later), Server 2019, and Server 2022, with local boot.
- Stand-alone Windows Server hosts and stand-alone Hyper-V hosts.
- Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) nodes and clustered Hyper-V nodes.
- Local clusters or stretched clusters over metro distance with uniform or non-uniform server mappings.
- Microsoft in-box Device-Specific Module (DSM) for MPIO.
- NTFS and ReFS SCSI data volumes (iSCSI and FC).
- SCSI cluster volumes (iSCSI and FC).
- Failover cluster volumes.
- Cluster shared volumes (CSV).
- Pass-through disks on Hyper-V guest VMs.
- In-guest iSCSI disks on Hyper-V guest VMs.
Note: PowerStore does not support Metro Volumes configured as boot-from-SAN (BfS) disks, or virtual Fibre Channel (vFC) disks.
You can learn all about the details in our comprehensive Dell PowerStore: Metro Volume white paper on the Dell Technologies PowerStore Storage Info Hub. The Metro Volume white paper includes many diagrams and examples to help you understand how it all works and how you can architect robust solutions in your environment.
Read the introductory chapters to gain a good understanding of how Metro Volume works along with use cases. Then dive into the chapter dedicated to how you can use Metro Volume to increase the resiliency of your Microsoft failover clusters and Hyper-V clusters.
You can read about Metro Volume support for Microsoft SQL in the Dell PowerStore: Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices Guide on the PowerStore Info Hub.
Conclusion
PowerStore Metro Volume’s local and remote connectivity options afford you great flexibility with designing creative solutions to protect and enhance the resilience of your Microsoft environment.
Contact your Dell Technologies representative to learn more about how PowerStore Metro Volume can benefit your Microsoft environment.
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Author: Marty Glaser