SnapDrive supports the feature introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 that enables you to add or remove a pass-through disk on a Hyper-V virtual machine without shutting down that virtual machine. This is sometimes called the hot add and remove feature.
A pass-through disk is a disk that is physically connected to a Hyper-V parent host and is assigned to a Hyper-V virtual machine as a SCSI hard disk for use by that virtual machine.
The following configuration requirements must be met to use this feature:
- You must be using Windows Server 2008 R2.
- .NET 3.5 SP1 or higher must be installed on the Hyper-V parent hosts.
- A version of SnapDrive that supports the dynamically adding and removing pass-through disks must be installed on all Hyper-V parent hosts and on all targeted Hyper-V virtual machines.
- Data ONTAP 7.3.1 or later must be installed on the storage system.
- If iSCSI is used for the pass-through disk, the iSCSI groups must already be configured and the iSCSI session between the storage system and the Hyper-V parent host must already exist.
- The SCSI contoller must be added to target virtual machines in advance.
Adding a SCSI controller requires virtual machine downtime.
- The Hyper-V parent host and the virtual machine must have TCP/IP network communication to all parent hosts and vice versa.
- A virtual machine must not have MPIO enabled.
On an HA VM on a shared disk, the virtual network names for both the nodes must be the same.
You can change the virtual network name of the parent node to ensure that the names are the same. If the virtual network names are different, then the shared pass-through disk fails and the following error message is displayed: An exception occurred in the service when handling the control request.
- A pass-through disk must be created from an HA VM by providing the drive letter or
mount
point.
If you do not provide a drive letter, SnapDrive displays the following error message: Pass-through disk cannot be created or connected without mount
point or drive letter.
- All the nodes in the cluster must be running the same version of Data
ONTAP DSM.
- The VM host name and the VM name must be the same.
Note: - If you uninstall SnapDrive for Windows, all SnapDrive registry key entries are removed from your Windows host. If you reinstall SnapDrive, you must reconfigure pass-through disks.
- SnapDrive lists all the FCP initiators (both connected and not connected) while creating pass-through disks in SnapDrive MMC.
