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I'm setting up a new Hyper-V 2012 server dedicated to virtualization and I'm trying to determine the best choice for the boot drive.

  1. I have 2x250gb SSD drives i'm considering for storage pools for VM's
  2. I have an old 80GB SATA drive

I'm wondering how important the primary boot drive is in a Win 2012 Hyper-V setup. I can partition one of the SSD's to provide a boot partition, or I can just dedicate the 80GB SATA.

What do you think would be a better choice?

Edit: A more precise question, why not partition the SSD for boot? Is there any benefit for separating the disks for boot vs just the partition?

Thanks,

Paul

Paweł Czopowik
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2 Answers2

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You shouldn't use the SATA drive but it's not because of performance. Host system disk performance doesn't matter much. But since you don't have two 80GB SATA disks, you have no redundancy and that disk becomes a single point of failure for everything running on the server.

MDMarra
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  • Although, performance would be worse on a SATA drive too... – HopelessN00b Apr 17 '14 at 22:34
  • I actually have 2 drives I can mirror :) What I'm wondering is how much worst off I would be for using a slow boot disk in this scenario. Maybe another way of asking is why not partition the SSD? – Paweł Czopowik Apr 17 '14 at 22:48
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    Performance of the host OS doesn't matter a whole lot. You can install it on an SD card, for example. – MDMarra Apr 17 '14 at 23:23
  • I know ESXi works well, but what about Windows 2012? I saw a guide about installing to a USB drive. I wonder if Windows works well with that. – Paweł Czopowik Apr 18 '14 at 05:31
  • I don't believe installing full Windows Server to SD is supported, but Hyper-V Server can be installed on certain removable media. I may have misspoke when I said SD, but a USB flash drive is definitely supported. – MDMarra Apr 18 '14 at 10:51
  • You can use SD. I have experimental setup on Windows that boots from SD. I had however to use third-party driver that maps removable disk (flash card in our case) as fixed as old Windows don't allow to put pagefile on removable medium. – BaronSamedi1958 Apr 20 '14 at 17:16
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Old 80 GB SATA should die soon because of age... I'd consider booting Hyper-V from USB stick. This approach should be more reliable (also it's trivial to do host backups). See:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj733589.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/11/18/booting-hyper-v-r2-off-a-usb-stick.aspx

Good luck!

BaronSamedi1958
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  • I got lots of those old workstation drives at my disposal, but I was also interested in the USB boot. I've been reading various things about performance on forums but not credible. Do you know if a good speed USB stick is required? Is the OS drive accessed often or does it run all smoothly in memory? (I know the page file is disabled on the USB stick). – Paweł Czopowik Apr 19 '14 at 21:11
  • You need flash only to boot as boot disk activity after that is sparse. Throw in tons of RAM to minimize paging. – BaronSamedi1958 Apr 20 '14 at 17:15
  • I know Windows always used paging, but not sure if 2012 still has this behavior. The USB boot method disables paging to the USB drive. I tried this over the weekend but this only boots to the shell (no GUI). Perhaps there is a way to deploy a full image on the USB drive, and I'll look into that, but for now I'm doing 2x80GB mirrored SATA drives to get started. I'll run some performance counters to watch for system drive activity over time. – Paweł Czopowik Apr 21 '14 at 18:15