I have been playing with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V, but I haven’t been able to locate a source of a free server to use (Okay, I am cheap, and won’t buy one). So I am using a laptop as my host machine. Horsepower wise it is fine, but the drive is small, and won’t handle too many Vhd’s at once. Not enough storage space. So I started looking for additional storage for my drives…
I have used USB hd’s in the past. They work well, but that means more crap sitting on my desktop, more cables, more power supplies. I decided to keep looking. I have a home server. Wonderful device. Between the HP device and a extra eSata drive enclosure sitting next to it, I have 7 TB of disk space. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could host the Hyper-V environment on my laptop, and store my lab Vhd’s on this pile of disk space. So, off I went….
Wait, what is this error? The home server presents storage to my network as a collection of shares. And Hyper-V won’t support storage on a share… Strike one. Next came the though of using iScsi, but after reading some options there, I decided it quickly got to complicated, threatened the stability of my home server (and if I messed it up, my wife would be looking for a place to hide the body. Our photo collection is sacred..), so strike two.
Then, an epiphany. Hyper-V won’t store on a share, but what about a drive letter assigned to a virtual hard drive living on the share. I went into disk manager, created and attached a 500 gig vhd file sitting on a share on my home server. Assigned it V:. And then, with fingers crossed, created a new virtual machine on that V: drive. It worked. Helps to have a healthy network (wired gigabit) and a reasonably fast set of drives, but for testing and lab use, it looks like it will do the trick.
Disclaimer, this is not a supported config. This is not something to use in an enterprise setting, but might be an interesting config for testing….