Moving from Windows Server 2016, to Hyper-V on Nano Server 2016. Will I need to format data drives?

[RamGuy]

I'm going to upgrade my server this weekend, and I plan to move from using Windows Server 2016 over to using Windows Nano Server 2016 with Hyper-V Hypervisior to host all my servers as VM's.

Nano Server 2016 is basically Windows Hyper-V Server 2016 with a lot of "crap" removed to lower the footprint. Which again is basically Windows Server 2016 running Server Core only with a few packages unavailable to install.

The thing is that I have three virtual disks running on a LSI/Avagao/Broadcom SAS RAID controller, they are all GPT, ReFS formatted and I don't want to loose any of this data. I want these partitions mounted directly to one of the virtual machines running on the Nano Server installation.


Is there any reason why this should not work? I will remove the RAID controller while doing the Nano Server installation and setup and re-add it afterwards just to make sure the installation doesn't mess with anything. But is there any reason why the disks, partitions etc won't show and be available to attach to virtual machines in Hyper-V afterwards?

 

[darkconz]

Just a quick question, off topic mostly, why would you choose Nano Server over plain Hyper-V 2016? If you want least amount of footprint, isn't Hyper-V 2016 your best bet?

 

[Evan]

To answer the original question, should be no issues at all transferring the drives between installs , may have to reset permissions if it's not part of a domain afterwards though.

 

[i386]

@darkconz
I think nano takes up to 450mb, while hyper v takes 8gb. In the officiall hardware requirements both need at least 32 gb for isntallation.

 

[darkconz]

@i386 but the 450mb doesn't include the HyperV feature activated yet right?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[i386]

It went from 440 to 600mb in the tp4, didn't test it with the rtm version.

 

[RamGuy]

I have had NanoServer and Hyper-V Server 2016 in a VM on my Hyper-V Server 2016 just to compare. Installation of NanoServer with Hyper-V Services installed and running it was about 600MB, compared to Hyper-V Server 2016 which about 8GB.

The installation size isn't not all that important, it's all about efficiency and when comparing NanoServer configured with all-cores, dynamic RAM (booting with 4096MB) compared to Hyper-V Server 2016 with the same config. NanoServer was never going above 1% CPU, and was mostly consuming 200-400MB RAM. Compared to Hyper-V Server 2016 which often went towards 10% CPU and consumed over twice the amount of RAM 600-1200MB RAM.

As functionality (besides of somewhat more hassle with installation) is basically the same, I see no reason for not going with NanoServer over Hyper-V Server 2016 at this point. The only thing I loose is RemoteFX, but all VM's I'll be running will be server installations, all headless without GUI so RemoteFX wouldn't benefit me.

 

[Net-Runner]

It looks like Microsoft is not going to recommend the deployment of nano server on bare metal and leave this edition for virtualization/containers only. Which incredibly sucks

 

[RamGuy]

I have NanoServer up and running on bare metal and its working great. The only issue I have is that the entire deployment USB just nuked my 14TB partition. Little did I know that the NanoServer Deployment USB was completely unattended so instead of installing of re-partitioning and write the image to either of my SSD's it re-partitioned and wrote itself onto my 14TB array.

I've fixed the installation, so I'm currently trying to recovery my lost partition on the 14TB array. As the entire installation was only a few hundrer megabytes one would hope that it hasn't really overwritten anything of value on the array.

So I have fired up both EASEUS Partition Master and EASEUS Data Recovery. But here I notice something odd. Partition Master doesn't list my lost / deleted partition at all. Even after doing a fast search on the drive array it claims that it can't find anything. I'm currently doing a complete scan, but that takes ages.

EASEUS Data Recovery on the other hand lists the lost partition immediately even without doing any kind of deep partition scanning on the array at all? I have started a deep scan on the lost partition and it seems to be able to locate about everything that was on the partition so I should be able to recover it.

But the thing is, I would much rather prefer to use Partition Master and get a complete partition recovery instead of using Data Recovery that will recover data from each file on the partition and not the partition it self.


How come EASEUS Data Recovery is able to locate a lost partition immediately while EASEUS Partition Master and its partition recovery tool is not able to locate it using it fast search (still takes hours to complete) can't locate it? Doesn't make much sense to me. Is it because of it being ReFS?

 

[i386]

I did a quick google search and it looks like EASEUS Partition Masterr is for "managing" and not for recovery of partitions.

 

[RamGuy]

Partition Master has it's own Partition Recovery Manager;
Partition recovery wizard - EaseUS Partition Master