Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > Dell PowerStore: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices > Present PowerStore storage to Hyper-V hosts and VMs
There are several ways to present PowerStore volumes as LUNs to Hyper-V hosts, nodes, and VMs.
PowerStore supports boot-from-SAN when hosts are configured with compatible adapters that also support boot-from-SAN. In Microsoft environments, boot-from-SAN is supported with stand-alone and clustered Hyper-V hosts and nodes. Guest VMs can also be configured to boot from a pass-through disk directly from PowerStore. However, use cases for bootable pass-through disks are limited in favor of virtual hard disks (VHDs).
The following lists include some advantages of booting from a SAN disk or a local disk.
Boot-from-SAN advantages:
Boot-from-local-disk advantages:
Present PowerStore boot volumes as LUN 0 to physical Hyper-V hosts or nodes that boot from SAN.
Present PowerStore volumes as data volumes to physical Hyper-V hosts, clusters, and VMs. This method supports:
Note: Microsoft does not support NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe/FC) or NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP). Support will be extended to Windows environments as Windows drivers become available. Check the latest PowerStore documentation to verify Windows support for NVMe/FC or NVMe/TCP before choosing the NVMe initiator type.
See the Dell PowerStore Administrator’s Guide and the Dell PowerStore Deployment Guide at Dell Support for an in-depth review of transports and cabling options.
PowerStore supports cluster shared volumes (CSVs). The same principles and best practices that apply to the creation and mapping of other types of volumes apply to CSVs.
CSVs were introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering. A CSV is a volume type that allows all nodes in a Hyper-V cluster to have read/write access simultaneously.
With CSVs, clustered roles such as Hyper-V VMs can fail over quickly from one Hyper-V node to another. This action does not require a change in drive ownership or dismounting and remounting host volumes.
CSVs are most commonly used to support Hyper-V guest VMs. With each new release of Windows Server, Microsoft continues to expand the types of workloads that are supported on CSVs.
A CSV is initially formatted as an NTFS or ReFS volume.