How the EFA Hyper-V Service Works

Use Extreme Networks' Extreme Fabric Automation to automate the configuration of the datacenter's physical network hardware after configuring your Hyper-V servers and their associated virtual machines.

Hyper-V Service Overview

EFA polls the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) tool to fetch the hardware configurations from the Hyper-V servers managed by it.

SCVMM communicates with the Hyper-V servers that it manages, using PowerShell commands and through proprietary communication mechanisms. SCVMM also provides a set of PowerShell commands that the EFA's Hyper-V service uses to fetch information from it.

The following information is queried from the SCVMM server.

• Hyper-V servers

• Virtual machines

• VM networks

• Logical networks

• Uplink port profiles

• Virtual switches

• vNIC

• pNIC

• VLANs

EFA pulls the above configuration information from SCVMM periodically. It then interacts with EFA Tenant Service to configure the End Point Groups (EPG). When configured, this step configures the appropriate VLANs on the connected ports on the switches.

Before you can use EFA Hyper-V service to configure your physical hardware, the following configurations must be performed on the various Hyper-V servers and on SCVMM. Datacenter admins must configure local entities in their setups. These entities are:

• Virtual machines

• Virtual network adapters

• Virtual switches

• Logical networks

• Virtual machine networks

Admins should also configure the physical network adapters on their Hyper-V servers to provide physical network connection ports to the fabric switches.