I have a Hyper-V host with 4 physical HDDs, 300 GB each, and this machine will host a couple of VMs, each probably with a size of approximately 150GB.
The VMs are not mission critical but I still need some kind of protection against HDD failure and would rather avoid RAID (please accept that I would rather find a software solution, for various reasons). First I was thinking of a setup like:
HDD 1:
VM A
full image backup of VM B
HDD 2:
VM B
full image backup of VM A
etc.
So if disk 1 fails, I can recover both machines from disk 2, and vice versa.
However, that feels very "manual" and I also need to have VMs of the proper size - e.g., if VMs grew to 200GB, this strategy would break down.
If the box was Windows 8 Server with the new "Storage Spaces" feature, I would almost certainly go for that (at least it sounds ideal for my scenario).
But in this pre-Windows 8 time, what do people use on Windows Server 2008 R2? Is there some built-in service that provides something like Storage Spaces today? Can 3rd party utilities like Drive Bender provide this functionality? Are they proven and reliable?
What happens when your disk controller fails? It's not really a backup if it's on the same physical host that you're backing up.
Your best bet for availability is to use RAID on the internal disks and back up your data to an external medium like a removable disk or tape.