Questions[vhdx](server)

I know Hyper-V is not able to handle ext4 file system, thus the compact will not compact correctly.

But I found some articles on the web suggesting zeroing unused space.

df -h actually returns :

Sys. de fichiers Taille Utilisé Dispo Uti% Monté sur
udev               424M       0  424M   0% /dev
tmpfs               88M    488K   88M   1% /run
/dev/sda1           20G    1,9G   17G  10% /
tmpfs              440M       0  440M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs              5,0M       0  5,0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs               88M       0   88M   0% /run/user/1000

Which tends to state that only less than 2Gb is used.

But vhdx file was 5,8Gb.

I used fstrim command in Linux VM (Debian 11), then shutdown the VM, and started to shrink the vhdx. It went to 4,7Gb. Still more than double as the content.

Then I did :

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/zeroes
sudo sync
rm ~/zeroes

Then shutdown and shrink the vhdx, no change, still 4,7Gb.

What's happening there and how is it possible to recover more space ? (I have a lot of Linux VM's with same issue, taking up a lot of unnecessary space on my test host).

We have a 4 node Hyper-V cluster running about 15 VMs. On none of them I have tested, can I inspect or edit VHDXs on running VMs. I get a permissions error of some kind when attempting to do so:

Given that the VMs are running, the hosts obviously have access to the files. I can browse to the location of the files and see them, and I can see currently Everyone has Full Control.

What else would prevent me from editing the disk given the above permissions?

We're running Hyper-V 2019 on a 2 node cluster. We have 2 VMs in the Failover Cluster which are clustered together to run a server. This service requires a shared disk. The shared disk is located in a CSV on the Hyper-V Cluster.

We recently stopped one of the VMs, but when we try to restart it we get an error

The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

When we try to inspect the disk on the other VM that is still running (and hosting the drive), we get the same error.

I'm facing a weird problem with Generation 2 Hyper-V VM, where I'm unable to extend partition in Guest OS.

Once I edit the VHDX & Expand it using Hyper-V Manager on the Host OS, and boot into Guest OS, I navigate to Disk Management to extend existing C:/ partition and see "Extend Partition" is grayed out because there is a 100 MB UEFI partition between C:/ and un-allocated space I just provisioned.

The only way to extend that I found was to use a paid partition tool like EaseUS or AOMEI, I'm unable to install their free versions as this is a Windows Server OS and they require Server editions of their software which are paid.

I tried using GParted Live CD, but it does not see to allow extending if partition is not adjacent.

How can I extend existing partition in Guest OS?

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.