Hyper V Host System Drive Strategy

[Dallas]

I'm seeing a lot of varying information on this subject. I am building a new Hyper-V home lab and want to setup my Host system drive + Guest system drive strategy.

Have purchased two Samsung 860 500gb drives with the intent to mirror and solve for both host and then guest system drives in different partitions.

Would like some thoughts on this though. Any other preferred strategy?

Also, what is the best method to mirror the drives? use the motherboards intel SATA controller to fakeRAID1 them or to use dynamic disks in Hyper V?

(Can I do this with Dynamic disks? I guess partition and install to one disk during setup, then mirror in powershell after?)

I have 8x4tb drives for storage that I intend to use via Storage Spaces VM. Quick question on this one too... should I pass the physical disks to the Storage Spaces VM to manage?

 

[Evan]

I have to say either intel fake raid or windows mirroring to be is a kind of broken solution.

In these instances also when it’s only a hypervisor maybe no raid is a better option ?

 

[cesmith9999]

I always like to have separate os and data drives. That way issues with one set does not interfere with the other. And you minimize data loss.

Chris

 

[j_h_o]

+1. Don't RAID. Just run 1 drive for OS, and 1 for VM data storage.

If you want redundancy, drop another drive inside, and run backup/replication software that periodically (every 15 mins) snapshots onto the 3rd disk. Keep them all as basic disks, so they're portable to another system if necessary.

 

[Dallas]

Thank you for the replies.

I'm hearing that there is really no need to mirror the hyper-v host system disk itself.

How about this approach?
-Use one of the 500GB SSD's for the host in a small partition
-Host the guest VM's in the remaining space
-Have a replication/backup strategy for the VMs themselves
-Data disks will not be using this SSD at all.

 

[j_h_o]

If/when the system doesn't boot because of failed Windows Updates (heh) you will need to reinstall the OS. Boot off a USB key and delete the system partition and reinstall.

1) If you put the data on the same disk, you have to be VERY careful not to delete the wrong partition. I prefer to just remove the SSD with my VHDs, do the install, then reinsert the VM SSD. Then I don't end up accidentally deleting something. (This always happens between the hours of 1am and 5am )

2) Or I just pull the VHD SSD out and plug it into another host and bring my VMs back online, and deal with the physical host when I have time.
This is what I prefer to do.

Therefore, I prefer to have 2 physical SSDs in each host, then rely on backup/replication for redundancy in case of hardware failures.

The 3rd disk can be a cheap spinning HDD. You just want more copies of your data; you don't need performance.