Hans Vredevoort, Cluster MVP, created a great post on storage integration included with VMM 2012 BETA.
In this blog he focuses on the Storage integration which can be accessed from the Fabric wunderbar.
One of the new features in VMM 2012 is integration with SAN storage arrays. The primary reason for this is of course there is not much point in building a Hyper-V Private Cloud without some sort of Fiber Channel, iSCSI or Shared SAS based type of shared storage.
Very much focusing on the standards that are available, Microsoft decided to employ the SMI-S Provider for this purpose, with VDS as a temporary option for backwards compatibility. Apart from managing software I had not had the pleasure to work with SMI-S before and I guess it is new for most of my readers. So let me first delve into what SMI-S really is.
SMI-S is short for Storage Management Initiative Specification and was defined under auspices of SNIA, the Storage Networking Industry Association. SMI-S defines a method for the interoperable management of a heterogeneous Storage Area Network (SAN), and describes the information available to a WBEM Client from an SMI-S compliant CIM Server and an object-oriented, XML-based, messaging-based interface designed to support the specific requirements of managing devices in and through SANs.
For the complete story: Hyper-V blog by Hans Vredevoort: VMM 2012 Fabric- Deep Storage Integration