Storage Spaces on Hypervised VM (Passthrough Drives No Longer Recognized)

Paul Guerra 6 Reputation points
2021-03-08T20:49:35.53+00:00

I set up a Hyper-V 2019 Server and a Single VM running Windows Server 2019. I passed through 4 HDDs to the Windows Server and created a Storage Pool. After restarting the drives appear in bios and under drives but no longer appear in diskpart/disk manager. However the pool appears under the hyper-v server in server manager (although the individual drives cannot be accessed). What appears to be happening, is that the Hyper-v Server is initializing the drive and seeing them as a storage pool, but of course hyper-v does not support storage spaces so fails but does not release them for the VM to use. Is there a way to prevent this? Or is this not a supported use case? Thanks, Paul

Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2019
A Microsoft server operating system that supports enterprise-level management updated to data storage.
3,569 questions
Hyper-V
Hyper-V
A Windows technology providing a hypervisor-based virtualization solution enabling customers to consolidate workloads onto a single server.
2,613 questions
Windows Server Storage
Windows Server Storage
Windows Server: A family of Microsoft server operating systems that support enterprise-level management, data storage, applications, and communications.Storage: The hardware and software system used to retain data for subsequent retrieval.
642 questions

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  1. Vitalii 0 Reputation points
    2024-03-11T18:57:13.14+00:00

    Any updates?

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  2. Net Runner 600 Reputation points
    2024-03-12T15:19:22.49+00:00

    Currently, it is not supported to run Storage Spaces inside a Hyper-V Server 2019 virtual machine with physical disks passed through to that virtual machine. The solution, however, is to have all physical disks separately for Hyper-V Server 2019, place a VHDX file on each of those physical disks mounted to the Windows Server virtual machine, and create a Storage Spaces pool on top of those VHDX files. Not sure if that is a supported scenario, but it definitely works. However, it may have significant performance drawbacks and complexity.

    A valid alternative is using a Linux virtual machine with physical disks or an entire storage controller (preferred) passed through to that Linux virtual machine. You can use MDRAID or ZFS to pool the disks into a single performant storage pool and pass it down back to Hyper-V Server (if needed) over SMB, NFS, or iSCSI. If you are not familiar with Linux, you can use a prebuilt Hyper-V appliance like Starwind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan, OpenMediaVault https://www.openmediavault.org/, or UnRAID https://unraid.net/.

    I hope that helps.

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