Skip to main content

KVM requirements

Contributors netapp-cgoff

You can configure ONTAP Select on the KVM hypervisor with an external storage array.

Basic requirements and restrictions

If you use an external array for the ONTAP Select storage pools, the following configuration restrictions apply:

  • You must define as the logical pool type using CLVM.

  • You must provide a storage capacity limit.

  • The configuration only supports FC, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and iSCSI protocols.

  • The configuration does not recognize thinly provisioned storage.

Caution The storage capacity you specify must be within the allowed storage limits of the external storage. An error occurs if you do not provide a capacity limit or the external storage runs out of space during the disk creation operation.

Best practices

You should adhere to the following recommendations:

  • Define dedicated network ports, bandwidth, and vSwitch configurations for the ONTAP Select networks and external storage

  • Configure the capacity option to restrict storage utilization (ONTAP Select cannot consume the entire capacity of an external storage pool)

  • Verify that all external storage arrays use the available redundancy and high-availability (HA) features where possible