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Cyril
Asked: 2016-05-21 06:37:58 +0800 CST

Hyper-V guest failover cluster file server

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Environnent is full Windows Server 2012 R2.

I have a Hyper-V cluster on which I host a testing fail-over cluster file server with 2 guests. Guest cluster is running and file server role installed and running fine with many shares on it. For now a single drive is hosting the data.

Since it is impossible to resize a shared vhdx I wonder if I choose the right solution for my needs. File servers has to be VMs.

What would be the solution to extend the data drive when it will get full ? Any solution without multiplying the number of volumes ?

Thank you.

EDIT : I would like, as I'm used to be on open source environments, to end up with a full failover file server on which I could extend the data volume without down time and to avoid using twice the necessary storage as for a DFS cluster without shared volume.

hyper-v file-server windows-server-2012-r2 vhdx hyper-v-server-2012

3 Answers

  1. In order to create a true “shared-nothing” failover file server you can use a free Starwind solution https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free.

    Basically it can do the same that Windows Server 2016 will do later but unfortunately only in the Datacenter edition. Starwind can do it already even with a free Hyper-V 2012 server https://slog.starwindsoftware.com/smb3-0-fileserver-on-free-microsoft-hyper-v-server-2012r2-clustered/.

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  2. Apparently you can take the shared VHDX offline (the shares will be unavailable), either by shutting down the clustered guests or by unmounting it, and then change the size of the VHDX and then bring it back online (or boot the guests).

    A few web searches have turned up people writing and agreeing that that's the only way to do it. There's one such conversation and a powershell script here that purports to automate the process with minimum downtime.

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  3. Because this is only a testing environment have you considered creating several shared VHDX disks and using them to create a Clustered Storage Space? that way you can add more disks to the storage space to increase capacity as needed.

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