Attaching a SAN Volume to a VM as a second disk

Question

Hello All,
I have recently setup a Failover Cluster in 2012 R2.  I am trying to setup a new file server that uses DFS in a VM.  I would like that VM to have direct access to the volume I created for files (as opposed to using an auxiliary mounted VHD).  Since
this VM is in the cluster, how would I go about facilitating this while not hindering the failover capability?  I tried to attach the LUN as a physical disk in the VM Settings, but it did not work.  Or at least I think that
is what the Failover Cluster Manager is telling me as I could not match the error code to anything.
Thank you for the help in advance.
Phill

Answer 1

Hello All,
I have recently setup a Failover Cluster in 2012 R2.  I am trying to setup a new file server that uses DFS in a VM.  I would like that VM to have direct access to the volume I created for files (as opposed to using an auxiliary mounted VHD).  Since
this VM is in the cluster, how would I go about facilitating this while not hindering the failover capability?  I tried to attach the LUN as a physical disk in the VM Settings, but it did not work.  Or at least I think that
is what the Failover Cluster Manager is telling me as I could not match the error code to anything.
Thank you for the help in advance.
Phill
Phill,
1) It's a bad idea to skip using VHDX layer and pass-thru disks to VMs. Just discussed here:
Hyper-V and do downtime
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/706f4e0b-02cc-4995-823c-deae90c89c1c/installing-new-hyperv-host-for-0-downtime?forum=winserverhyperv
More see here:
Hyper-V & iSCSI: VMs or host connectivity?
http://windowsitpro.com/blog/iscsi-and-hyper-v-connecting-vm-or-host
2) To have VM movable you need to have connectivity to disk you pass-thru to VM from every single host your VM is going to be run.
3) Is it iSCSI or FC? For iSCSI everything is trivial: you just use built-in iSCSI initiator like you'd do it on the host. For FC you use Virtual FC which is mapping virtual FC HBA to a physical FC gear. See:
Hyper-V
Virtual Fibre Channel Overview
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831413.aspxIn
general, pass-thru disks configuration inside Hyper-V VMs see:
Hyper-V Pass-Thru Disks
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2008/10/24/configuring-pass-through-disks-in-hyper-v.aspx
Hope this helped :)
StarWind Virtual SAN clusters Hyper-V without SAS, Fibre Channel, SMB 3.0 or iSCSI, uses Ethernet to mirror internally mounted SATA disks between hosts.