WHS2011 & Drivepool as VM: bad idea?

[nitrosyl]

As part of a fever dream of upgrading my server hardware, I'm entertaining the notion of installing WHS2011 and Drivepool as a VM on ESXi or Hyper-V.

 

I'm concerned, however, that Drivepool won't be able to (properly) see the physical hard drives and manage them correctly.

 

Does anyone have experience with doing this, and could you let me know if running Drivepool in a VM will work well with the physical disks?  Thanks!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It works fine.

 

You can find a few threads here about running the pool in a VM, in fact.

 

Heck, I actually HyperV for testing, and it works fine with both VHD disks and for passed through disks. DrivePool has absolutely no issues with it.  All the drives look like normal disks to the OS, and to DrivePool.

[otispresley]

I can also attest that this works well with ESXi 5.5 with RDM disks as well.  The negative to RDM is that you have to keep track of each disk physical location in ESXi and in the VM.  Also, adding or removing disks adds the steps for adding/removing from the VM.  You can also pass through the entire storage controller to the VM which will remove this extra step.

[nitrosyl]

Perfect!  Thanks for the answers, y'all.  I think I'll plan on just passing through the storage controller to simplify things, but just knowing that it can work saves me a lot of nail-biting.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

HyperV is much more simple.  You just set the disk offline in disk management (or there is a way to set *all* new disks as offline, which is GREAT for hyperV), and then when you add storage to a VM, you just select the disk from the drop down underneath the "Physical Disk" option.

 

The down side is that HyperV doesn't pass through the SMART data, while ESXi, RDM can.