Need to spec a new 2012 R2 server and thinking about putting the Hyper-V host partition on a pair of software mirrored SATA drives for resilience.
I also like the idea before doing any updates, as I have often done on server 2003, of shutting down the server and pulling out one of the mirrored system drives . If there is a problem the server can be booted from the original drive. If no problem the older drive can be hot-plugged back in and synchronized with the running drive.
Question is can this be done easily.
It seems to me there are two methods of mirroring a pair of drives in Windows 2012 R2:
- Storage pool / mirrored virtual disk
- Disk management mirrored physical disks
Option 1: Is it possible to boot from a storage pool array? Option 2: Assuming the server will have arrived with the Hyper-V host installed can I add another disk to this to create the mirror or will that wipe all data on the existing disk?
Or is there a better way of doing this.
You cannot boot from a Storage Spaces volume.
You can run Hyper-V 2012 (and R2) from a mirrored volume on dynamic disks (which can absolutely be SATA disks). For very low-end scenarios (like one of my test lab servers, for example) this works fine. Adding a mirrored volume with
diskpartis a viable option and will not cause any data loss in the already-installed boot volume.Whether this is appropriate redundancy for your application is up to you to decide. Windows isn't as likely to continue running in the face of a failed disk as a hardware RAID controller would be.
Personally I always recommend hardware raid, preferably with a dedicated raid controller. You didn't mention the server's hardware specs so not sure what's viable there. With hardware raid it is (generally) pretty invisible to the OS what you are doing on the raid.
Don't forget, if "resilience" is your goal, that all disks in the host need raid, even temp drives, since a failure there causes a shutdown.
So I'd recommend (2) with hardware mirroring.