Running Hyper-V 2012 from USB flash?

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jac

Member
Oct 21, 2012
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Bellevue, WA
Anyone booting Hyper-V from a USB flash device like an 8 or 16 GB HP v125w USB 2.0 device?

Is there a way to protect your Hyper-V configuration when the USB stick dies? E.g. copy some files somewhere and stuff those files back onto a new USB stick when the first one dies?
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Very interesting. I have done this with ESXi but never Hyper-V.
 

jac

Member
Oct 21, 2012
48
0
6
Bellevue, WA
Very interesting. I have done this with ESXi but never Hyper-V.
So veering off topic since this thread hasn't gotten much attention... how are you protecting your ESXi usb deployment for fault tolerance of the flash device? :) [I don't protect mine, but should]

I only started down the path of exploring Hyper V 2012 for my new build because I don't like the 32 GB RAM limit ESXi has locked into.
 

TallGraham

Member
Apr 28, 2013
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Hastings, England
Are you running your server diskless and booting from USB? If so have you thought about doing away with the USB and booting straight from iSCSI?

Only any good if you have a separate NAS box and are using iSCSI LUNs of course
 

Darkytoo

Member
Jan 2, 2014
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I just tried this and failed. I was stuck on flipping the removable bit on the USB flash drive. If you do some research online, it will give you some brand names to try, but you have to re-flash the usb drive to show up as a disk instead of a removable drive, and i ruined 2 flash drives trying to accomplish that, so I just bought a small SSD and was done with it.

But if you do get it to work following microsoft's recomendations, you are left with a .VHD left on the hard drive, so if you can't take a regular image of the server, you could just copy the VHD off the stick.