Hyper-V Shared VHDX – File Sharing Setup

There is no problem running a File Server role on Hyper-V hosts. In general, mixing other roles with Hyper-V is not a good thing. However, the File Server role has been specifically designed and tested to run alongside Hyper-V. One thing I suggest doing is using Windows 2012 R2's QoS features to carve out network capacity for your Hyper-V role vs. your File Server role.

I would not create multiple VM's just to make a clustered file server. If you need that level of complexity for business reasons, then the business should pay for dedicated hardware to created a clustered file server. Failover times on the File Server role will be faster than running a cluster in a guest.

Failover clusters require shared storage. Without it, if a machine dies, the data on them is inaccessible and there's no way to failover without the data.

I don't believe there is any built in fault tolerant method of using the local drives. For clustered virtual machines, you need shared storage, and internal drives don't qualify.

What you can do, particularly if this is temporary while you are doing SAN maintenance or upgrades, is lose the fault tolerance. If you are using SCVMM, uncheck "Make this virtual machine highly available". If you are using the failover cluster manager, remove the virtual machine from the cluster manager (it will still exist on the physical host). Then use Hyper-V manager to move it to the local storage.

When you do this, you lose the fault tolerance - if a physical host dies, any VMs on that host go with it. You will still be able to use the non-clustered version of live migration to move them between hosts during normal operation - but it will mean moving the disk files too, so will take longer.

When you are done, move their disks back to shared storage and make them highly available again.