Mirroring Hyper-V host – Win 20012 R2

hyper-v-server-2012windows-server-2012

Need to spec a new 2012 R2 server and thinking about putting the Hyper-V host partition on a pair of software mirrored SATA drives for resilience.

I also like the idea before doing any updates, as I have often done on server 2003, of shutting down the server and pulling out one of the mirrored system drives . If there is a problem the server can be booted from the original drive. If no problem the older drive can be hot-plugged back in and synchronized with the running drive.

Question is can this be done easily.

It seems to me there are two methods of mirroring a pair of drives in Windows 2012 R2:

  1. Storage pool / mirrored virtual disk
  2. Disk management mirrored physical disks

Option 1:
Is it possible to boot from a storage pool array?
Option 2:
Assuming the server will have arrived with the Hyper-V host installed can I add another disk to this to create the mirror or will that wipe all data on the existing disk?

Or is there a better way of doing this.

Best Answer

You cannot boot from a Storage Spaces volume.

You can run Hyper-V 2012 (and R2) from a mirrored volume on dynamic disks (which can absolutely be SATA disks). For very low-end scenarios (like one of my test lab servers, for example) this works fine. Adding a mirrored volume with diskpart is a viable option and will not cause any data loss in the already-installed boot volume.

Whether this is appropriate redundancy for your application is up to you to decide. Windows isn't as likely to continue running in the face of a failed disk as a hardware RAID controller would be.

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