Virtual Fibre Channel SAN#

Microsoft Hyper-V provides Fibre Channel (FC) ports within the guest operating system which allows customers to connect to Fibre Channel directly from within virtual machines.

Hyper-V customers can utilize Fibre Channel SANs to virtualize workloads that require direct access to SAN logical unit numbers (LUNs).

Virtual Fibre Channel gives you the ability to cluster guest operating systems over the storage fabric using a standard World Wide Name (WWN) associated with a virtual machine. This also provides customers an additional option to configure guest clusters on Hyper-V VMs without the limitations of Shared VHDx.

This feature provides the following:

Increased performance.
Enables you to virtualize workloads that use direct access to Fibre Channel storage.
Allows you to cluster guest operating systems over Fibre Channel.
Provides an important new storage option for servers hosted in your virtualization infrastructure.

Rackspace currently supports Virtual Fibre Channel SAN on Windows 2012 R2, Windows 2016, and Windows 2012 Guest Virtual Machines.

For more information on the Virtual Fibre Channel, see Implement Hyper-V Virtual Fibre Channel.

Deploying virtual SAN#

If you want to deploy virtual SAN on a managed virtual machine from your environment, submit a ticket with you Rackspace Microsoft Hyper-V Support team.

Important

Unmanaged virtual machines cannot have SAN storage deployed on their virtual machines.

VMs using vFC require file-Level backups by installing a client backup agent on the VM. Image-level backups are not available.